It's a woman's world in higher-ed

Lü Ang, a 23-year-old graduate student at Communication University of China (CUC), experienced an embarrassing moment during a recent trip to the restroom in a classroom building at CUC.

"I've forgotten that this restroom had recently been converted into a women's room," he said. "I rushed in and rushed out again immediately."

Lü is certainly not the only man to make this mistake, as CUC has recently transformed half of the men's toilets in classroom buildings into women's.

"It can be a bit annoying, but I understand why they did it," Lü said. "Before the shift, girls would have to line up forever in order to use the toilet."

This restroom shift is just one symptom of a growing issue confronting many college campuses: the proliferation of female students, often at the expense of boys.

"At CUC, girls far outnumber boys," said Xu Baoquan, chief of the CUC Logistics Service Center. "We've been struggling to accommodate this demand."

Lü counts nine male students and 22 female students in his major of communication studies and only four male students to a whopping 47 female students in the international journalism department.

"I haven't spoken to a boy in over a month!" joked Huang Xiaoyun, one of Lü's female classmates.

Similar shifts in facilities have taken place at Guangdong University of Business Studies and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, in a policy which received majority support from both male and female students, according to the newspaper Yangcheng Evening News.