She specialises in very tough messages to women: "I turned to look at the audience," she writes, of a speech she gave at Harvard Business School in 2011, "paused, and answered with brutal honesty. In fact, Sandberg's message is subtly different – we hold ourselves back because of a raft of factors: social expectation, a lack of domestic assertiveness, a sense that, from the minute we reach maturity, we are forward-planning for our own subservience.
I took it for a motivational speech, thinking that by "gas", she meant "female power" and by "taking one's foot off", she meant women were frightened of their own power – I took her for a sort of Nelson Mandela for girls, "our deepest fear is that we are awesome beyond measure". It was only natural that it should become a book, but it's only in the elongation, I realise, that I fully understand what she meant. The talk was an immediate hit, generated reams of comment internationally and has now had more than 2 million views on YouTube. I say "they" rather than "we" one of the conclusions I draw from Lean In, the book that resulted from this talk, is that the women whom Sandberg addresses, the ones who are missing from their rightful place in the boardroom, are quite a distinct group, not interchangeable with "all women" and certainly not synonymous with "feminists", but we'll come to that shortly. They were too small in number because they faltered on the way there, and they faltered because they "took their foot off the gas". I n 2010, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, gave a TED talk about women in the boardroom.
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