This article highlights the presence of the gender component in any type of discourse and its linguistic implementation. The aim of the study is to determine the gender component in the discourse of Western and Russian gender-oriented lifestyle magazines using a comparative analysis of the used English and Russian language means of lexical-grammatical (gender-marked language units) and semantic-syntactic (assessment, modality of sentences, syntax sentences) levels. The cognitive-linguistic approach allows us to prove that in the publications in question two types of discursive representation of masculinity and femininity are used: the type of “reflection” and the type of “construction”. The presence of gender neutral or gender-marked units of language in texts is associated with the intensity of the male / female dichotomy, this ratio reflects the predominance of egalitarian or traditional gender representations in society. The authors’ choice of the lexical repertoire, the general modality of statements and the syntactic organization of sentences correspond to the discursive tasks of publications, the linguistic tools used at the cognitive level translate certain models of gender behavior into the minds of the general readers. Analysis of 4000 contexts taken by continuous sampling from popular men’s and women’s magazines in the UK, USA and Russia for the period of 2012-2017 (“GQ”, “Men’s Health” (MH), “Men’s Fitness” (MF), “Esquire”, “Tatler”, “Cosmopolitan” (Cosmo), “Glamour”, “Women’s Health” (WH), “Women’s Fitness ”(WF),“ Marie Claire ”(MC)) allows us to identify common features and peculiarities of the discursive representation of masculinity and femininity in English editions and Russian-language versions of the same name, containing both translated and original (author) articles.