If you are a woman in your late twenties or early thirties and choose to remain single in China, you would have to make peace with being acknowledged as "leftover women" or shengnu. 

Wait, it's not as bad as it sounds (okay, maybe it is). But two Chinese firms are giving their single female employees over the age of 30 an additional eight days of annual leave to "go home and date".

According to a notice posted by Hangzhou Songcheng Performance and Hangzhou Songcheng Tourism Management, unmarried women in "non-frontline" roles can take the extra break during the week-long Lunar New Year holiday. 

According to reports, China’s marriage rate has dropped every year since 2013, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, leaving roughly 200 million single adults in the world’s second-largest economy.

The burgeoning middle class and a rapidly growing economy have led to Chinese women increasingly focusing on their careers and choosing to marry later, or choosing to remain single altogether.

This trend is adding pressure to China's demographics with its slow-growing population despite the abolition of the one-child policy. 

In 2018, there were 15.23 million live births in China, a drop of two million from the year prior, according to official data.

A high school in Hangzhou, a city in eastern China, has also rolled out a new policy to give single, stressed-out teachers an additional two days off every month as "love leave".

"Female employees mostly work in internal functional departments, and some are show performers," said Huang Lei, a human resources manager at one of the firms. "They have less contact with the outside world; thus we hope to give more leaves to them to give them more time and opportunities to be in contact with the opposite sex."