The article is devoted to studying the impact of gender on speech behavior in mass media discourse. Gender peculiarities of English news text-formation are examined through coordination of various language means that belong to different levels of the language system with predetermined socio-cultural factors and psychological peculiarities attributed to man as a representative of masculine subculture, a communicative leader, characterized by autonomous thinking, logic, rationality, objectivity, lingua-creativity, reduced emotionality, and woman as a representative of feminine subculture, characterized by a greater degree of emotionality, empathy, cooperativeness. A number of gender parameters is listed, including content and structural features, specification / generalization of information, stylistically neutral / marked vocabulary etc. These parameters are being viewed as related with the categories of informativeness and expressiveness. It is determined that the features of the news text on the structural level manifest themselves in the selection of aspects of the events described, the organization of informative blocks. On the stylistic level gender specificity is expressed by linguistic realization of emotionality, evaluation, imagery. Gender parameters of the news text determine masculine and feminine styles of news text-formation and are included in the developed matrix of gender identification of the author of the news text. The psycholinguistic experiment allowed to verify the validity of gender parameters of the news text and to establish that the degree of sensitivity to its gender characteristics is determined by socio-cultural differences of native and non-native speakers of English.