
China's 'leftover' women - snake117
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/10/china-leftover-women-151029141452444.html
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josu
The article makes it sound as if this is a modern phenomenon and as if it is
exclusive to China. This pressure for women to get married has always existed
everywhere. The burden has somewhat alleviated recently in Europe (maybe in
other developed countries too), but it is certainly there for all the
developing countries.

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fredkbloggs
Yes. And while the cultural aspects are worth understanding, neither they nor
the women are the real story in China. As you note, there have always been and
will always be people of both sexes who are single through choice or
temperament. But in China, the real story is leftover men. When you have such
an enormous sex imbalance at birth for as long as China has, no amount of
natural excess male mortality is ever going to even that out. So when you take
the Chinese population, segregate it by broad age groups, subtract out those
who are single by choice and pair off the rest, you're left with tens of
millions of young and middle-aged single men.

History's solution for this, almost invariably, is both simple and guaranteed
effective. The leftover men are called an army, and they either die in combat
or conquer foreign lands, where they can take -- by force, usually -- the
stock of available women after killing the menfolk in battle. In either case,
the imbalance is corrected.

That's the real "leftover" story in China: if those men aren't to be an army,
then what are they to be?

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theandrewbailey
> The leftover men are called an army, and they either die in combat or
> conquer foreign lands

Or they conquer their own land, i.e. a revolution.

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fredkbloggs
> Or they conquer their own land, i.e. a revolution.

Maybe, but that doesn't solve the problem. They're still single and would
rather not be. Something else still has to give. A very long civil war might
do it, if that's what you're suggesting.

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FD3SA
The "pressure" for these women to find their ideal spouse is similar to the
"pressure" startups face in finding ideal employees. That is, they want the
absolute best at rock bottom prices.

If you read the article, many of these women who desired to get married had
numerous suitors, but these suitors were judged unfit for one reason or
another and thus failed to meet the women's strict requirements. Much like
companies wanting to hire 100x developers at 30$ an hour, these women are
unfortunately trying to bend the supply/demand curves to their tastes, rather
than working within the reality of the market.

As an aside, marriage as an institution in western societies is now a legal
quagmire [1]. It's legal roots were laid down in times when women did not earn
much and did not vote, so they were paid very generously in case of a divorce
whose fault could be proven. Nowadays, divorce is the single most powerful
legal instrument to take half of someone's net worth without any reason
whatsoever. Marriage as an institution is beyond repair, and any couple who
supports the spirit of family unity should boycott legal marriage for their
own sake, as it leads to extremely toxic financial incentives for the lower
earning spouse.

Just another case study in man-made systems which are patched and reworked
continuously without thought to the designer's original intent.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8)

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rodgerd
> If you read the article, many of these women who desired to get married had
> numerous suitors, but these suitors were judged unfit for one reason or
> another and thus failed to meet the women's strict requirements

In traditional societies where marriage is a one-shot that generally ends a
woman's career prospects (or, one could argue, shunts them into being a wife),
this is entirely rational behaviour.

If you were only allowed to pick one job when you left university, and
couldn't resign and get a new one, you'd give suggestions you lock yourself
into McDonalds the short shrift.

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WalterSear
Not if you end up without a job.

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itsybitsycoder
Well, for how long? Not all the job offers come in at the same time. If your
only offer so far is McD's, it might be worth it to do some extra job training
for a year to be a more attractive candidate and then see how things go after
that. Even though it's another year of unemployment.

There are actually "wife skills" classes you can take in these countries, I
just saw one from India the other day. Offered to cover everything from
cooking and cleaning to beauty to party planning.

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FD3SA
This is a very deep topic, but in summary, I believe the difficulty for women
looking to marry in this day and age actually has more to do with the supply
side.

Marriage is a terrible, terrible decision for any individual with above
average income or assets. Given that most people who get married want to have
kids, and because of biology women usually need to be the ones to take
maternity leave, this creates an imbalance in earning power that only
intensifies throughout the length of the marriage.

As a result, the lower earning spouse has an increasingly larger financial
incentive to initiate a divorce. Note that this incentive is completely
independent of the relationship between the spouses, because of the way
marital assets are divided after a no-fault divorce.

Even in the happiest marriage imaginable, if there's any income/wealth
disparity, the spouse on the low end has a massive economic incentive to
initiate divorce for a payout.

This is why I said in my first post that marriage is an inherently broken
institution, and needs serious reform. Incentives matter.

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mcv
It's odd that there are so many female "leftovers". With the skewed gender
balance due to the one child policy, I'd expect mostly male "leftovers".
Though I guess they don't carry as much of a stigma as women do.

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Isofarro
It's a side-effect of cultural norms going back thousands of years. In
marriage, status is a key factor, and the parents of both partners are the
main decision maker whether to allow a marriage or not. Status wise: A man
marries a women of lower status, a woman marries a man of higher status --
that's more likely to be approved by both sets of parents. (And parental
approval is important in Chinese families)

Which means, there's talented, very smart women in China who are struggling to
find suitable husbands, because they are equal to high status men. And those
men are looking for women with less status.

The Male leftovers tend to then be at the bottom of the status chain, because
there's no lower status of women to marry. So there are loads of rural areas
and villages where women have moved to the city, and men remaining have no
viable marriage prospects. (This is the segment negatively affected by one-
child policy)

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cousin_it
It looks like the Chinese government has adopted some impressively sane
policies to even out the gender ratio:
[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/02/chinas-great-
ge...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/02/chinas-great-gender-
crisis) Though a lot still remains to be done, I'm happy that at least some
people are thinking about the problem seriously.

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raincom
This has to do with 'modernization' in the sense that moving away from
agrarian society has changed the dynamic of picking partners. It has also
given ample freedom to pick and reject: the search space has broadened. When
the search space is broadened, you end up thinking that 'more suitors' are out
there.

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NTDF9
Why is it always women issues? There are men leftover too.

As I see it, men are leftover because they are passed over (by women) for
"better men".

Women are leftover because they are passed over by men looking for "younger
women".

So, to optimize mating, men need to work hard in their youth and establish
themselves and women need to be VERY active in their partner hunt.

As harsh as it sounds, men juggle career and love. Some men succeed, some
don't women are now being asked to do the same. Some women will succeed, some
won't. I don't feel sorry.

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rbanffy
Having no children has big implications when the pension system is not
sufficient to ensure retirement.

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samfisher83
Given there are more guys than girls maybe the problem is the girls are too
picky.

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hellbanner
"Twice a week groups of about 30 to 60 parents meet in the same spot, each
carrying pieces of paper containing information about their child - their job,
level of education and salary, as well as their physical attributes."

