Writing is influenced by a lot of different things. One of the most common influences that people wonder about, however, is gender. Does being male or female affect the style or content of your writing? After reading a couple of articles and just looking at what I see in the world around me, I think that it does. While it does affect your writing, however, you aren’t born with a specific mindset towards it based on your gender. Instead, it has to do with how people are treated and raised.
One essay I read, “Composing as a Woman” by Elizabeth Flynn, posed the theory that women’s writing tends to be more focused on relationships and emotions, and men’s writing tends to be more about success. This hasn’t been my experience. But if it is true, it’s probably because of how men and women are raised and taught to write. From a young age, men are often taught that they need to be successful. They have to build their lives around picking a good career, getting a stable job, having a good financial situation, etc. With that constant pressure, I would imagine that success would take up a considerable amount of their brain space- and would therefore leak into their writing. Women, on the other hand, tend to be treated as more emotional, as well as being taught more relational skills by their mothers. (This is just completely generalized, and I realize that in a personal sense for most people it wouldn’t always be true.) Therefore, that bleeds through into their writing as well.
I think gender is probably one of the many things that factor into a person’s writing, but I wouldn’t say it’s as black and white as “women are emotion based” and “men are success based.” There are certainly some elements of that, but it is definitely more from the individual’s upbringing than anything else. I have seen very success-focused pieces written by women, and very deeply emotional and relational pieces by men, so none of these are set in stone. Gender does have an effect, but the effect it does have definitely varies.
Writing Wizard 