COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GENDER-BASEDCONVERSATIONAL FEATURES IN WHATSAPP ACADEMICGROUPS

Abstract

This study examines gender-based conversational features in WhatsApp academic groups, comparing
how male and female university students communicate within task-oriented, peer-to-peer digital
exchanges. Adopting a mixed-methods comparative design, the study combines quantitative content
analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, drawing on twenty WhatsApp conversation threads (eight
male-dominated, eight female-dominated, and four mixed-gender) comprising 20 messages from six
male and six female participants. Messages were coded for linguistic features (directness, hedging,
politeness, and message length) and interactional/paralinguistic features (topic initiation, questionasking, emoji use, and code-switching). Findings indicate that female participants produced longer,
more elaborated messages and used politeness markers considerably more often than male
participants, who favored brief, direct, imperative-style requests. Emoji use occurred at similar rates
across genders but differed sharply in type and function, with male use concentrated in a single
humor-oriented emoji and female use spanning a broader affective range. Male participants asked
more frequent, but shorter, questions, while female participants asked fewer, more elaborated ones.
Notably, topic-initiation rights were evenly distributed between genders in mixed-gender threads,
suggesting that stylistic differences did not correspond to unequal conversational power. These
findings extend existing sociolinguistic and computer-mediated communication literature into the
underexamined genre of academic WhatsApp groups and carry implications for how educators design
and interpret digital group communication in higher education