Speaking in a hearth chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Sandberg – who authored the bestseller book on women at work “Lean In” – said her Foundation is actively seeking to get CEOs to recognise the problems for ladies within the workplace, and discuss it.

She said: “As a CEO if you’re willing to speak about this and address gender head on and say ‘hey, here’s an issue’ that concerns women, that’s a competitive advantage.”

The foundation is likewise encouraging more companies to establish “lean in circles”, groups of 10 or so employees who meet to debate and mentor one another at the gender issues facing both women and men.

She said there’s evidence that folks who’ve mentors perform better within the workplace, but she added it usually is difficult getting male leaders and feminine employees in a room one on one – adding that 64 per cent of managers within the US are afraid to be in a room alone with women.

“We have the desire to make it a badge of honour for males and females to be alone in a room together. Everyone must be appropriate. There’s no mentoring that occurs in a bigger group. We need to make it a badge of honour for folks in power to mentor women.”

She also discussed the language linked to confident females – from “bossy” girls within the playground to “aggressive” women within the workplace. She advised leaders that the subsequent time a women is described as being aggressive to “take a deep breath” and ask specific questions.

Later she discussed a trend she has seen recently of CEOs seeking to assign more women to the board to deal with a gender imbalance, which she said could offend some women who’re invited and make some people believe women are being given an unfair advantage to fill the quota.

However, Sandberg believes in this occasion a further advantage is critical to undo all of the “systematic bias” at the “unlevel playing field”.

She said: “I believe if we had more women on the table where decisions are made, we might make better decisions. Companies with more women in senior roles make better decisions.

“Some people question me: would the sector be peaceful [if women were dependable]? I don’t know, let’s try it, it can’t get any worse.”

Although the chat failed to cover any of Sandberg’s day job at Facebook, she did say CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked her the question – which subsequently was publish to lots of the walls inside Facebook’s HQ – “what would you do in case you weren’t afraid”? This spoke of the certainty that insecurity is what holds many girls back.

She answered that she would “speak out for women” and went directly to write Lean In, which was published in March this year.

Sanberg’s comments follow a report by marketing recruitment agency EMR that men are twice as prone to reach the pinnacle marketing positions than women.