A Study on Writing Ability Differences between Male and Female Students in Describing People

Gender is considered to be one of the distinguishing levels of students' success in language acquisition including writing ability. Descriptive text is one of the text types that should be mastered by English Language and Literature Departments students of Universitas Negeri Padang. This study intends to investigate and analyzed male and female students' writing ability differences in writing a descriptive text about describing people, from the aspects of generic structure and grammatical features. This research was conducted by using descriptive research and using a test as an instrument collected from 26 male and 26 female students of the English department, Universitas Negeri Padang. Moreover, the researcher used quantitative data analysis because the data was measured using numbers and values. The result shows that male students and female students' writing ability in describing people at the mean score were slightly different. The male students scored 2,92 (good) and the female students scored 3,09 (good). In addition, male students had a weak ability in grammar and mechanics, but female students only had a lack of ability in grammar. However, both of them got a higher score in identification.