Mongolian women are finding it increasingly difficult nowadays to find suitable candidates for marriage, The Guardian reports.

According to the National Statistics Office of Mongolia, the marriage rate in the country’s capital in 2016 was only 8.9 per 1,000 people as compared to 22.9 per 1,000 in 2007.

The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that women in Mongolia ‘face the dual cultural pressures of establishing a career and getting married before the age of 29,’ the newspaper adds.

‘Young girls are taught they should succeed, then you succeed and there’s no equal partner for you. The social pressure is for you to get married but finding an equal partner is very hard,’ one columnist remarked.

At the same time, the head of the Men’s Association in Govisümber province pointed out that while many Mongolian men had lost their jobs during the privatization of state-owned companies in the 1990s, the government and NGOs ‘focus more on women than on men.’