Are there alpha females

Just for a moment I want to put aside all the usual debates about women at work — the glass ceiling, the difficulties of combining a career with a family, the prejudices, age, appearance, and the different standards of behaviour for men and women. Instead, I want to look at alpha females as a unique phenomenon, something that transcends the usual commentary about women in the workplace. The second thing is that they are instantly recognisable. You immediately know when an alpha female walks into the room.

The third point is that they can be surprising and full of contradictions. In London there are a number of alpha females who are worth studying. Here are three who have stood out in recent years for being truly impressive and groundbreaking in their respective fields and I am sure there are many more who will come to light in the coming years. Last year, she fought off an armed robber who tried to mug her outside her home. Even though she had a handgun pushed into her stomach and was pistol-whipped across the back of her head, she fought off the attackers and was back at work the next day, sporting a large bruise from the attack.

Ms Horlick ascribed her success to her support systems, her mother, nanny, and husband. Next is Karren Brady, the year-old managing director of Birmingham City Football Club, the first woman to hold such a post in English league soccer. Appointed in , when she was only 23, she was responsible for its flotation in and became the youngest Managing Director of a UK plc in the process.

However a partnership of two Alphas is a recipe for disaster, according to Dr Rhodes. The type of man she should be looking for is not afraid of strong women she says. He is the man many contemporary women have been waiting for, but he is not adequately appreciated in a culture where the Alpha male has reigned supreme. Australian women are increasingly out-earning men. According to research commissioned by the National Australia Bank NAB they have reported being the main breadwinner in This is an increase of Dr Rhodes says she is not suggesting that women marry beneath them.

The Beta male is so secure he is not threatened by the Alpha woman. He will support and respect his partner and care about what is important to her. I think this is pretty terrific. Karen Chaston from Sydney says she has been the Alpha female for most of her year marriage. Alpha male position is a very important position and everyone wants to take it from you, and so you constantly have to watch your back.

You have to be extremely vigilant. For example, you have to disrupt the coalitions of others, and that's what male chimpanzees do quite a bit, divide and rule strategies they have. That's a very stressful situation.

We actually have data on this. The data comes from the field, from baboons -- not chimpanzees in this case -- where they did fecal samples on the baboons and they analyzed them for glucocorticoids. What you see here is a graph where you see that the lower ranking the male baboon is, the higher is his cortisol level in the feces.

But the alpha male, as you see, has just as high a level as the lowest ranking males. You may think that being alpha male is nice and dandy and it's wonderful, but it's actually a very stressful position, and we can demonstrate that physiologically.

Now what are the obligations? Here, for me, it gets really interesting and it deviates very much from your typical image of the alpha male. The alpha male has two sorts of obligations. One is to keep the peace in the group. We call that the "control role," to control fights in the group. The second is to be the most empathic, the consoler-in-chief, basically, of the nation, so to speak.

First of all, keeping the peace. This is a male who stops a fight between two females. Two females on the left and the right have been screaming and yelling at each other over food because food is very important for the females. He stops the fight between them and stands between them like this. It's very interesting to me that alpha males, when they do this, they become impartial.

They don't support their mom or the best buddy or no, no. They stop fights and they come up for the underdog, in general, and and this makes them extremely popular in the group because they provide security for the lowest-ranking members of the group. They become impartial, which is an unusual condition for a chimpanzee to be in because they're usually very fond of their friends and so on, and these alpha males who are good at this, they can be very effective at keeping the peace in the group.

The second thing they do is they show empathy for others. Now, I do an enormous amount of research on empathy -- and I don't have time to go into it -- but empathy is nowadays a topic that we study in rodents and dogs and elephants and primates, all sorts of animals. What you see here is two bonobos.

The one in front has been beaten up in a fight. The one in the back puts her arms around her and consoles her. This is also actually how we measure empathy in young children, by looking at how they respond to distressed individuals.

High-ranking males do a lot of this. High-ranking males provide an enormous amount of comfort in the group, and they go to places where there are earthquakes or hurricanes, and they provide comfort. The Pope does this. The presidents do this. All the leaders in the world have to do this job. The Queen does it and so on. They all have to do this job, so providing consolation, and that's a very important task.

Males who are good at these two -- keeping the peace and providing comfort -- become extremely popular leaders. There are actually some self-interest involved in it. They don't do it just for the group because it also stabilizes their position. The more popular a male becomes as alpha male and the more the rest of them respects them and looks up to them, the better their position is defended in case it's going to be challenged by somebody else because then, of course, the whole group is going to support that male because they want to keep a leader who is good for them.

The group is usually very supportive of males who are good leaders and is not supportive at all of bullies. When bullies lose their position and they may end it in a very bad situation there. This is data, actually, on the consolation behavior. This is data on conservation in chimpanzees. You see for the medium- and low-ranking individuals, the females do more of it than the males. This is basically the whole community and this is true for all the mammal studies on empathy, that females have more of it than males, but look at the alpha male.

The alpha male does far more than anybody else and so that's the data on alpha males being the controller-in-chief, basically. The last thing I want to say is something about alpha females. This is a picture of Mama, the alpha female of the Arnhem Zoo where I used to work, who is now all over the Internet.

I think million clicks at the moment for a video of her dying at the age of 59 which happened last year. Mama was an absolute centrum of the group, so she was not physically capable of dominating the males.

She ranked below the males, but she was the center of the community. If there was big trouble in the community, everyone would end up in the arms of Mama, and so she was a very important figure. I don't want to minimize the position of alpha females in the chimpanzee group. Then we have a species that is equally close to us as the chimpanzee, the bonobo. We often forget about the bonobo, but the bonobos have a matriarchal society, and the alpha individual is a female, generally.