SAN FRANCISCO May 31 (DPI) – Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has spent the last few months promoting her book encouraging women to assert themselves more in the workplace.

But posters identifying themselves as working women are not only unimpressed by the message – they’re put off by the messenger too.

By negative-positive margins of four and five to one, comment boards dismiss, criticize and even ridicule Sandberg not only for what they see as self-crafting celebrity, but a warmed over message that, most say, carries little relevance to working women on any rung of the career ladder. Sandberg’s primary message in her book, “Lean In”, is that women need to assert themselves more at the office.

More than a few readers, too, said they saw Sandberg as utterly unsuited to the role of post-feminist cause-leader, given that she landed options-laced senior management jobs at tech monopolies and is today worth hundreds of millions.  As one WSJ.com poster wrote: “Sandberg didn’t rise to the top, she started there.”

Sandberg has pledged to lead a social movement on women in the workplace, a cause that many readers scoffed at.

Overall, readers posting on NYTimes.com and WSJ.com – and especially those identifying themselves as women —  were surprisingly harsh toward Sandberg. Even the filtered comment boards of NYTimes.com reflected hostile sentiments, with the highest recommended posts leading the way:

(Most recommended, 372 recommendations) “OMG, the Sheryl Sandberg lovefest continues. I thought it had ended in 2012 but she’s baaaaack! Sheryl, we realize that you are the most gifted woman ever to grace the halls of corporate America and have nurturing skills second to none. But as someone else mentioned, please explain your relationship with Larry Summers, one of the architects of the financial collapse and a Harvard executive who mentioned that women do not have the skills of men in science? Oh yeh, but who cares about what the mentor does as long as it benefits you?”

359 recommendations:  “I’m sorry but there is something creepy and unsettling about someone who would say, with a straight face, ‘I always thought I would run a social movement.’ ”

(322) “At a time when most women are struggling to get by, and when social mobility is at an all-time low, a member of the 1% chides us for our failure to join her impossibly privileged circle. Anyone else nauseated by this?”

(313) “Why not distribute the book for free online if you really care about the cause?”

WSJ.com poster

“I want to hear a story about a real woman who rose to the top of corporate america from her own grit, not have it handed to her on a silver platter. Sandberg herself stated in the 60 minutes interview that when she asked the google guys what role does she do and the response was that when you’re on a rocket about to blast off you don’t ask what seat to sit in. She got very very lucky but she doesn’t have the humility to acknowledge that.”

WSJ.com poster: