China has upset its young female population by labelling those who fail to marry by the time they are 27 as ‘left over woman’.
Growing number of educated, professional, urban females aged 27-30 have ‘failed’ to find a husband.
‘Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult,’ reads one article titled ‘Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy’.
The derogatory name has caused an outcry among millions of ambitious young and educated females who claim they have been thrown on the scrap heap - and who bemoan the low quality of suitors.
And census figures show that around one in five women aged 25-29 is unmarried.
The proportion of unmarried males that age is over a third higher - but Chinese men tend to ‘marry down’ both in terms of age and educational attainment.
‘There is an opinion that A-quality guys will find B-quality women, B-quality guys will find C-quality women, and C-quality men will find D-quality women,’ Huang Yuanyuan, a confident and single 29-year-old who works in a Beijing radio station, told the BBC.
‘The people left are A-quality women and D-quality men,’ she said.
But the Chinese Bridget Joneses are fighting back, demanding the government ban the ‘left over women’ term.
The All-China Federation of Women has recently dropped the label and now refers to 'old' unmarried women - but the left over expression remains widely used elsewhere.