COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GENDER-BASED CONVERSATIONAL FEATURES IN WHATSAPP ACADEMIC GROUPS

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, question-asking, 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.