A year ago, I was fortunate to travel to Hanoi University of Public Health and Hanoi Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital to present scienctific writing workshops to academicians and researchers. Out of that trip and research came a clear need to develop a special issue for our journal on Vietnamese women's health issues. You are now reading the results of our labors with special guest editors Hoang Van Minh and Nguyen Canh Chuong. The entire special issue required the assistance of Elizabeth Fugate-Whitlock, Managing Editor, without whom the issue would not have been possible. I am adding her name therefore as my co-author of this editorial. After my editorial you will find an introduction to the special issue written by our Vietnamese colleagues, edited by Elizabeth Fugate-Whitlock.
Following this editorial, you will find an introduction to our special issue on Vietnamese women's health issues, written by our guest editors. The stats presented in the introduction are accurate, yet for our international audience of feminist scholars and practitioners, I am adding more data, i.e., a Vietnam population pyramid ().
Figure 1. Vietnam population pyramid. Data from https://www.indexmundi.com/vietnam/age_structure.html
Population pyramids are heuristic tools because in examining them one finds hints of where health resources could/should be spent. Examining the pyramid I see at once that Vietnamese population is a young population, where the vast majority of adults are of childbearing age. One would expect from this pyramid that most research on women's health issues would be about relatively young women and this is certainly true and appropriate in what is published in our special issue. Examining the pyramid further, I see that while the population is in an overall sense evenly distributed between males and females, gender disparity does exist among different age groups. The disparity favors males at birth through middle age. The disparity is greatest in childhood, gradually becoming reduced until it equalizes and eventually reverses after the age of 65, in favor of females.
Women, in the current generation, have been more likely to survive to old age than have males, as more males died than did females in wars fought in Vietnam during the 20th century. The fertility of the current Vietnmese population has been affected by the wars, most likely due to the spraying of defoliants which has been shown to reduce sperm count in men, and to damage the ova of women and girls and thus to result in a high rate of miscarriage and birth defects. For good reason Vietnam has invested resources to improve fertility outcomes for future generations and their researchers are to be applauded for their successes in this regard. During my stay in Vietnam, I was tremendously impressed with the progress made by Vietnamese researchers to reduce incidence of morbidity and mortality in women of childbearing age. The authors published in this speical issue certainly highlight some of these successes.
I was also impressed with the equity in educational and employment opportunities I observed for women. Women are in leadership positions not only in health care and education, but also in banking, tourism and in other forms of international commerce. I travelled with my husband who had been to Vietnam earlier, in the late 1960s, under the worst of circumstances. On our recent trip, he was impressed with tremendous economic development, joint ventures with both capitalistic and communistic countries, modern transportation highways, and the overall friendliness of the population. Positive changes are quite abundant and these are what he recognized as we travelled throughout the country. Similarly, I feel good about publishing research on young women who migrate for employment oportunities because such research calls attention to the potential for gender equity. And, the research on HIV/AIDS has earned its place in the journal because of the incidence and prevalence rates for this condition.
As an editor of a feminist journal I am personally troubled, however, by the bottom of the pyramid showing significantly more male children than female children in 2016 because there are likely to be many issues associated with this disparity that are unexplored in the research published here. Moreover, I am a gerontologist. While my examination of the population pyramid suggests to me that relatively few women in Vietnam are currently old, there is a disproportionate number of old people who are in fact women. As in many areas of the world, more resources in Vietnam are needed for health issues of older women. We received zero submissions about health care for this population and I thus hope that Vietnamese scholars will consider the needs of older women in fiuture research studies. Just as it is our hope that readers will find parallels amongst the work published in this special issue and their own work in their own geographic location, I belive we can also find commonground in these areas of disparity as both can and should inform our future research agendas. As always read and learn.
Eleanor Krassen Covan, PhD and Elizabeth Fugate-Whitlock, PhD
February 26, 2018