Single, Female, and Accomplished: What That’s Like in China
They are educated and remarkably successful, but they get called “leftover women”
One out of four of all the women in the world live in China. The current generation includes young women who live radically different lives than their mothers did when they were young. As Roseann Lake, a reporter for The Economist, notes in her book, Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower, “A well-educated, professional woman in Beijing or Shanghai now has more in common with a well-educated, professional woman in New York or Los Angeles than she does with a female Chinese factory worker from a town just an hour’s train ride away.”
Unlike their mothers, today’s young women in China have greater opportunities to stay single longer, or even for life, and pursue educational and career opportunities. Lake believes that this is an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, which was in effect from 1979 through 2015. Chinese parents greatly favored boys, resulting in a lopsided sex ratio, but when their one child was a girl, they showered her with the necessary resources to pursue an education and a career, and encouraged her to do so.
Chinese parents want their daughters to succeed, but they also want them to marry. “Modern day…
