ABSTRACT
Drawing on three years of research in Ha Giang province, the heartland of Viet Nam’s Hmong community, this chapter explores how discriminatory gender norms continue to restrict Hmong girls’ access to education, limit their marital options and compel them to take on arduous domestic workloads. It argues that despite transformative change in access to primary and lower-secondary education, Hmong girls – who belong to the country’s most marginalised ethnic minority group – continue to be largely valued for the work they can do, rather than for who they are. Indeed, even the most motivated girls are rarely able to attend upper-secondary school and are instead expected to work, first for their parents and then for their marital families. Most continue to be married young to boys with whom they are barely acquainted. Our research suggests that to support Hmong girls to achieve the futures they are beginning to imagine for themselves, attention should focus on shifting the gender norms that effectively entwine notions of femininity with cultural identity.
