The article is written based on secondary data extracted from the “Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey” data set of General Statistic Office (GSO-2014) including data of 9,399 households with 23,543 observations who are males and females at the age of 15-60. The paper presents the results of the comparison and multi-dimensional comparative analysis on the production labor participation as well as economic contributions in the household of men and women in Vietnam. The comparison among the target group is the head of the household, showing that the average income of the male household-head is similar to that of the female household-head. Meanwhile, survey data in the group of people after working age shows the difference in total income. Accordingly, considering female and male at the age of 55-60 with their household’s total revenue, the households with post-working female have higher total revenue than households with male at the same age male. These evidences suggest that labor participation differs significantly between men and women after they have passed age 55. In the broken marriage group with single status is a popular phenomenon, the personal income and total income of female households are approximately 2.5 times higher than men’s. The article also discusses the need to mainstream gender in policies for employees in order to promote equality in labor and employment, and increase economic contribution to the family and society in Vietnam.

There is continuing interest in gender topics and gender roles in the traditional publications and modern electronic media. This research aims to discuss the role gender discrimination in advertisements on mass media in contemporary Vietnam society through gender images on publications/ posters/TVCs, celebrities and interviewing script writers. Cause-and-effect theories or questions have been used to study about gender roles and the role gender discrimination, which were inspired from day-to-day lives. This study examines those relationships and analyzes the position of celebrities through advertising to light up people’s awareness about gender roles. These findings have strongly confirmed the gender discrimination in advertisement, including KOLs statements; in which mass media products that are portraying women as ornaments or caregiver, while men often appear with leadership or power roles.

Ethnic minorities, characterized as a vulnerable group in Vietnam, have benefited from the country's labor market participation and economic growth. But still, many factors and mechanisms have influenced the widening of the ethnic poverty gap in Vietnam. They include the household resources, such as education, vocational training, labor market information, and their efficiency of using such resources. In addition, social networks have been studied as channels to transfer opportunities for labor market participation, migration, trades, and innovation in technology, which have narrowed the gap in the country. However, social networks may also transfer risk aversion, creating more barriers for the ethnic minorities to participate in the labor market and then negatively increasing the ethnic gap. Therefore, using the qualitative approach on a small-scale survey in a multi-ethnic community, the study investigates the impacts of social networks on the ethnic poverty gap. The study focuses on how social networks affect the risk aversion of labor market participation of ethnic minorities. The survey informs positive impacts of social networks, as measured by an increase in total household resources (e.g., information, advice, finance, human resources, consensus on the labor market participation). Outreach-based social relationships beyond the village, especially non-family, non-frequent-contact relationships, are channels of those impacts. Nevertheless, most social networks of ethnic minorities have only close bonding social relationships that provide public information, not such as competitive and experiential information from non-family, non-frequent-contact bridging social relationships. As a result, several negative impact mechanisms are found: (1) social networks raise the risk aversion to new livelihood; (2) family relations, close relatives tend to offer not competitive information.