“Same same, but different?” Gender-based variation in business student writing

Gender differences in communication have been the subject of much systematic investigation, suggesting that women are more likely than men to use tentative language. While the notion of genderlect is used to describe gender-related differences in face-to-face communication, it is still unclear to what extent these differences may also be observed in written discourse. The relationship between writing style and gender has attracted conflicting interpretations from previous studies. What we know about gender-linked effects in writing is largely derived from research using fully automated, statistical methods. This explorative study therefore addresses a neglected aspect of corpus linguistic research into L2 English writing, using a bottom-up, inductive approach to examining gendered writing styles. The database of this study consists of two research corpora, one for each author gender. Results showed that, although both male and female student writers use a range of research-oriented clusters, male authors are chiefly concerned with research topics in a technical way. Female business students, on the other hand, appear to engage more actively with the research process itself. Another main finding is the gender-based preference for certain topic areas, with the ‘soft’ topics definitely being those selected by female students. The study implies that specific-purpose writing instruction would benefit from gender-sensitive teaching.