Are Kenyan Campus Ladies Too Generous? An Evaluation of Gender Biases in Staff Appraisal Systems in Kenya

Abstract

There is empirical evidence regarding behavioral cross gender disparity with male and female gender will arguably exhibit different behaviors when faced with similar circumstances. One school of management thought postulates that women are socialized to take care of their families and their communities. This socialization has been advanced as a motive of empathy and caring, a precursor to women generosity. On the basis of motivation, previous studies focusing on women generosity in charity giving have attempted to discern why, when and how women have tended to be more generous than their male counterparts. Thus far, generosity has been viewed only on monetary basis. Performance appraisal (PA) has been recognized as one of the most important tools in the human resource management (HRM). PA systems are prone to errors and biases including: tendency, contrast, discrimination, employee appearance, fame, halo, leniency, severity, order, bias, proximity, attitudes, values and recency. The employees are the heart of the company and the success of any organization highly depends on employees' characteristics and qualities. The whole HRM function depends to great extent on the success of PA systems. PA systems are affected by various errors and biases one of which is gender generosity. This study investigates the impact of gender biases in the performance appraisal of lecturers at Meru University of science and technology, school of business and economics over the period between January 2019 and September 2019. The study employed the logit regression model on a Likert scale questionnaire administered on 99 pairs of students drawn from a population of 2352 on performance of a pair of two lecturers. The results correlate positively with empirical affable gender