Gender in Low-Imposition Email Requests

For some years now, communication between university students and faculty members has favoured the use of emails as opposed to face-to-face consultations. Previous research has pointed out the difficulties students may face to write an email to a professor since sociopragmatic variables have to be taken into account to show deference. This study investigates whether students’ gender influences the structure, framing moves and pronouns of address in naturally-occurring requestive emails written in the students’ L1. Our results show that both male and female students started their emails with a greeting. Females also identified themselves more and used more pre-closing formulas and their signature to end the emails. Contrary to the general stereotype that females are more polite, the emails written by female students included the informal Spanish pronoun tú to address their professor for the first time. In contrast, males used usted and tú in a more balanced way in their emails.