It's the first stop on her first-ever book tour, and Sheryl Sandberg is beaming. In conversation with her friend Chelsea Clinton, the Facebook COO discusses the "ambition gap" women face in the workplace, which she admits is a touchy subject.

During the question and answer session in a New York Barnes & Noble Tuesday, Sandberg drills through her usual talking points: As men become more successful they are better liked, but as women become more successful they are less liked. Women hold no more board seats than they did one decade ago; the figure has staggered at 14%.

We've heard the arguments about the challenges presented by men in the workplace, which is why I have a question for Sandberg: Are women holding other women back? (She answers me, but I'll get to that later.)

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The reaction to Sandberg's Lean In is the latest in a storm of critiques of successful women by other women, nitpicking each other's similar but different mantras.

Another leading lady of Silicon Valley, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, recently took a heavy hit from the media for reportedly eliminating the company's work from home option for all employees. Though it was later revealed this policy would only affect 200 full-time remote workers, critics argued that the decision would prove particularly hard on working mothers who require flexibility to balance their responsibilities in and out of the office.

"Mayer is going to regret this decision," Farhad Manjoo wrote in Slate. "It’s myopic, unfriendly, and so boneheaded that I worry it’s the product of spending too much time at the office. (She did, after all, build a nursery next to her office to house her new baby)."

Mayer reached the decision after learning that several remote workers never log in to the company's Intranet while working from home, effectively doing nothing while on the clock. Had a man made the call, would he have drawn the same critique, or been called a responsible leader?

In addition to the working from home debate, Mayer notoriously returned to work just two weeks after giving birth. Her short maternity leave drew widespread gasps, as bloggers claimed she was "doing women a disservice" with her rapid return.

Sandberg and Mayer, two women who have achieved the type of professional success most women — and men — could only dream about, are under a performance microscope. But is the foremost reason for their contentious spotlight chiefly due to a lack of Y chromosome?

Media Reaction to 'Lean In'

Throughout the last three weeks, Lean In and the non-profit LeanIn.org Sandberg's launching in conjunction with the book have sparked an abundance of online discussions about feminism. The critiques began with The New York Times' Feb. 21 front page story, in which Jodi Kantor quoted Sandberg's interview for the PBS' Makers documentary about feminist history, without its full context.

The Facebook COO says, "I always thought I would run a social movement, which meant basically work at a non-profit. I never thought I’d work in the corporate sector," although Kantor just included her first clause, "I always thought I would run a social movement."

The quote drove people to dub Sandberg power hungry. Being the married, mother of two COO of one of the hottest companies in the country was not enough for her; she had to start a revolution.

Two days later, Kantor's NYT colleague Maureen Dowd wrote a follow-up column, claiming Sandberg's motivation was advancing her own brand, not other women's careers. Dowd wrote, "Sandberg has co-opted the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself."

By Feb. 26, The Times had corrected both stories with the complete statement Sandberg made in Makers, but the damage had been done.

Headlines such as the Daily Mail's, "Sheryl Sandberg's feminist project fails to get off the ground... because the average working woman can't relate to the $500m Facebook COO," were popping up all over the web.

Are Women Holding Women Back?

When Sandberg replied to my question at the Barnes & Noble event, she explained that competition between women could be attributed to the "Queen Bee" phenomenon: Just as there can only be one queen bee, many women have felt there is only room for one woman at the board table.

Women, therefore, may constantly be watching their backs to avoid the advances of other women.

Though not all of Mayer and Sandberg's critics are women (Slate's Manjoo, quoted above, is a male), the Facebook COO said at her Barnes & Noble event that all the chatter sparked by her book — and there has been a lot of it — has been written by women.

The fact that women are Sandberg's main critics recalls the time former State Department official and academic Anne-Marie Slaughter notoriously called out Sandberg in her August 2012 Atlantic cover story, maintaining the latter holds women to unrealistic standards. Jezebel founder Anna Holmes hit the nail on the head in The New Yorker, when she described the two as "less ideological opposites than dissenting allies." Sandberg and Slaughter both want women to go far in their careers while maintaining fulfilling family lives, yet the two happen to disagree on minor details.

At the heart of these discussions, neither Sandberg nor Mayer can speak for or represent the opinions of all women. But web critics continue to split hairs, rather than applaud the progress pioneered by these two successful women in the public eye.

Of course, the problem is not unique to the tech world. Look no further than recent feuds between comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and pop singer Taylor Swift. Or the post-Oscars discussion of why women love Jennifer Lawrence but hate Anne Hathaway.

Women certainly are not the root of the problem, but they could be one more obstacle to overcome before achieving equal workplace representation.

Images courtesy of Flickr, Magnus Hoij and World Economic Forum; composite by Mashable