Today, I was called an Alpha female.
I’m not sure if I am proud, offended or merely indifferent.
I’m in a seminar for my department at OSU about “Foundations in Evolutionary Biology” or some such as that. That’s not really important. What is important is that we have an interesting mix of people. It is primarily males, nearly all of whom are very opinionated alpha males. There are five of us females (out of 17) and this tends to be worriesome, as most of the girls are very, very quiet. And the professor today, the one who set up the seminar and unofficially guides the discussions, referred to our mix of people as testosterone driven and full of Alpha males. Then he turned around, looked at me and said “and of course alpha females too, kelly.”
See, we have the opposite problem that most groups have. We simply can NOT shut up! Almost all of us know each other fairly well, we know one another’s disciplines and we lack a lot of the shyness that tends to quiet such groups down. While a lot of the girls (well, the other four) seem to take that as a reason to not jump in…it exacerbates my natural tendency to be mouthy, opinionated and well, verbose. (I’m sure you never noticed those characteristics). But especially in the sciences, I’m not known for taking a back seat…If I go to the effort of reading the paper, I sure as hell want to horn in on the discussions about it.
But is being the “alpha” male (or female) always good? Top dog and what not, I suppose but it also implies an amount of aggression and well, at least for the female portion, Bitchiness.
So. How do I feel about this? the Jury is still out. I respect the professor very much so who called me that. It was not, I don’t think, meant to be offensive. And the rest of the students took it well…
How would you feel about it?
