LiftIOWA picked a couple of articles for you: one that we actually missed last year and another that just makes us feel good about women in 2014.

The first is a Fortune magazine article that made Fast Company’s top 10 favorite business stories in 2014. Fortune had a linguist look at 248 performance reviews of 180 high-performing tech workers:105 men and 75 women.

If you caught this article, you can probably pass Fast Company’s quiz question: What’s the one word men will rarely read in the performance reviews but women will?  

Don’t have the answer?  Here’s a hint from the Fortune article:

Not long ago I was talking to an engineering manager who was preparing performance reviews for his team. He had two people he wanted to promote that year, but he was worried that his peers were only going to endorse one of them. “Jessica is really talented,” he said. “But I wish she’d be less abrasive. She comes on too strong.” Her male counterpart? “Steve is an easy case,” he went on. “Smart and great to work with. He needs to learn to be a little more patient, but who doesn’t?”

Author Kieran Snyder, in her study of the performance reviews, noted that gender bias shows up in the language that managers – both male and female – use to address women employees.

Words like bossy, abrasive, strident and aggressive are used to describe women’s behaviors when they lead; words like emotional and irrational describe their behaviors when they object. All of these words show up at least twice in the women’s review text I reviewed, some much more often. Abrasive alone is used 17 times to describe 13 different women. Among these words, only aggressive shows up in men’s reviews at all. It shows up three times, twice with an exhortation to be more of it.

Snyder found that women’s reviews are more likely to include critical feedback than men’s. Snyder also found that while men are given constructive suggestions, women are given constructive suggestions – and told to pipe down.

Here’s how the numbers look: