Vietnam is grappling with a widening gender gap among its marriage age population, with new government data showing more than 400,000 men currently outnumbering women in the same age bracket, a shortfall set to worsen sharply within the next decade.
The figures come from a population forecast report for 2024 to 2074, released by the General Statistics Office under the Ministry of Finance. The report draws on the 2024 mid term population census, the most recent survey available, which found that men aged 20 to 39, considered the prime marriage age group, exceeded women of the same age by roughly 415,200 people.
Statisticians attribute the imbalance to a long standing distortion in the sex ratio at birth, a trend that demographers first flagged in the early 2000s and that has continued to shape the country’s population structure ever since.
Under the report’s medium case projection, the gap is expected to widen further in the near term. By 2029, more than three in every 100 Vietnamese men of marriageable age are projected to have no equivalent female counterpart, simply because there will not be enough women in the same age group.
The situation is forecast to deteriorate further by 2034, just eight years from now. At that point, the report estimates the surplus of marriage age men over women will reach 711,700 people, accounting for 4.9 percent of all Vietnamese men aged 20 to 39.
The trend underscores mounting concern among policymakers over the long term social consequences of gender imbalance, an issue Vietnam has been monitoring for more than two decades but which official data now suggest is entering a more acute phase.
