A Chinese expert urged the government to give special attention to more than 25 million widowed elderly women in China's rural areas with a lack of physical care and emotional support.
The number of rural widowed women 65 years old and above has reached 25.72 million, Zhang Yinfeng, an assistant researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, said in his latest report on China's aging population published on the Chinese Social Sciences Net on Thursday.
Zhang's research shows that the number accounts for more than 44 percent of the female elderly population in the countryside based on a one percent sampling on the national population in 2015 released by China's National Bureau of Statistics.
The rural female elderly population is twice the male's, according to the report, saying that almost half of rural elderly women live without spouse, including those who are divorced or single.
One reason for a huge population of rural elderly women is a shorter life expectancy for rural men, Lu Jiehua, a sociologist at Peking University, told the Global Times.
Lu also said more young people from rural areas are migrating to the big cities to work, which forces them to leave their elderly parents behind with less care and support.
The proportion of widowed rural elderly women is much higher than expected. The government and society should exhaust all means to provide them support, read the report.
In some rural areas, widowed elderly women cannot be paid for land acquisition or collective benefits, news site caixin.com reported.
"The government should take the gender gap into consideration in its senior citizen support policy and give preference to rural elderly women," Lu added.
