From parity to power: Gender mainstreaming and the contradictions of equality in Vietnam’s education sector

This article examines how gender mainstreaming as global social policy is translated within Vietnam’s post-socialist education bureaucracy. Drawing on interviews and documents from a 2010–2011 IIEP–UNESCO study with ministry and university leaders, reread alongside 2020s Vietnam-focused scholarship, it shows how equality becomes administratively visible without becoming decision-making power. Findings identify three mechanisms that reproduce inequality despite parity commitments: moral economies of carework, gendered professionalism and respectability, and temporal bias in retirement, training, and promotion rules. The article also theorizes gender mainstreaming as an epistemic infrastructure—focal points, templates, trainings, reporting mechanisms, and state and quasi-state actors—that standardizes evidence while narrowing which remedies appear institutionally “realistic.” Vietnam thus highlights a broader contradiction: recognition expands as redistribution stalls. The article concludes with implications for reforms that redistribute time, transparency, and authority.