It is well known that post-secondary science and engineering programs attract fewer female students. In this paper, we analyze gender differences through text mining of over 30,000 applications to the engineering faculty of a large North American university. We use syntactic and semantic analysis methods to highlight differences in motivation, interests and background. Our analysis leads to three main findings. First, female applicants demonstrate a wider breadth of experience, whereas male applicants put a greater emphasis on technical depth. Second, more female applicants demonstrate a greater desire to serve society. Third, female applicants are more likely to mention personal influences for studying engineering. [For the full proceedings, see ED593090.]