Gender equality in performance assessment to nurture the ASEAN entrepreneurial spirit: an exploratory study in Vietnam

The drive towards ASEAN collaboration requires greater insight into culturally related attitudinal influences. In particular, to enable women to fulfil their entrepreneurial potential, and to work in technology roles traditionally regarded as suitable for men, and to fully participate in cross-border initiatives, it is crucial to understand relevant attitudes between genders in terms of performance assessment. The relationship between each gender in the family, society and the workplace and the value placed on each by the other are also affected by cultural attitudes in each country. This research uses ‘performance assessment’ to measure an interaction between pairs of managers and subordinates of the same or different genders. It posits that higher scores may result from positive bias and lower scores at least in part from gender prejudice. The study investigated over 700 supervisors to subordinate combinations, represented by company supervisors and interns, in a substantial number of companies in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, Vietnam. The measures refer to performance assessments between the supervisor–employee dyad, and thus the influence of gender is only one variable in the performance measure. When examined, correlations support the view that regardless of the gender of the supervisor, male subordinates score higher on “Problem Solving” and “Collaboration across Departments”, while female subordinates score higher on the variable “Drive to Learn”. When the genders of the pair are the same, then scores for “Collaboration across Departments” was highly significant.