Dana Kanze, the Harvard Business Review study’s author, led a team of Columbia University researchers to comb through almost 200 videos of entrepreneurs pitching at a TechCrunch funding competition in New York. She tracked the words investors used when asking questions and found they use different words depending on the gender of the entrepreneur. When speaking to men, investors used words like "gain," "hope," "ideal," "accomplish," "achieve," "aspire," "obtain," "earn," "expand" and "grow." But female entrepreneurs, said Kanze, hear a different kind of language. The questions investors ask them include words like "accuracy," "afraid," "anxious," "avoid," "careful," "conservative," "defend," "fear," "loss," "obligation" and "pain."