People talk about alpha males but I guess there's also the phenomenon of the alpha female. But I have the impression the alpha female types tend to be not well liked by their peers and end up losing a lot of friends and even ending up embittered. The alpha male is a different kettle of fish entirely, it's more of a slagging/piss-take thing. The alpha male is the guy that has the best jokes and is allowed to take the piss out of everyone. But, males are more likely to stab each other in the front rather than backstabbing and there's less bitchiness in general. If someone, even the alpha male, goes too far with their slaggings or pisstakes, it's like, f*** you, say that again and I will actually hit you. Society doesn't allow females to go for that very direct and confrontational approach.
I'm not sure how applicable the 'alpha' label really is to anyone who's widely disliked. Usually that term implies possessing a kind of irresistible charisma, not merely being bossy or decisive or whatever.
In groups of female friends, there often enough
is one woman who's the prime social galvanizer, typically takes the lead when planning the evening's agenda and so forth. But it's true that you'll seldom see the kinds of overt performance of dominant/submissive roles, however playful and qualified, that you'll see among male friends. In fact, in my experience, women who don't socialize much with men beyond romantic relationships are often taken aback to observe the 'slagging/piss-taking' stuff--they read it as aggressive, as the swaggerers lording it over the stooges, and wonder why the men taking the most slagging "let themselves get treated like that." I think that's probably pretty telling: women experience their social reputations as much less resilient than men do theirs, so there's more anxiety and defensiveness surrounding them and, correspondingly, less room for 'playful' slights.
I don't really have a grand theory how patriarchy might fit into all this, though I think it's probably relevant that--like it or not--male validation generally carries more social weight than female validation does, and therefore the interdependency within all-female groups is actually more superficial than with men: i.e., women remain somewhat isolated and vulnerable socially, even within the group. Which can make competition pressures--a normal and natural backdrop to any social group--rather treacherous at times. And at least to my mind, the ugly, toxic forms of female aggression cited by the OP are more about failures to handle competition constructively, than they are about the competition itself being "bad." But yeah, broader social norms concerning how women are supposed to behave--don't act pushy, don't act angry and so on--definitely factor in too, as does the related tendency to grant women less scope for 'authoritative' behavior. It's not at all unusual for a woman to fear confronting another woman more than confronting a man.
Re: behavior vis-a-vis subordinates--I'm afraid I've been on both the giving and the receiving end of that. I can remember, when I worked in retail management, being distinctly and uncomfortably aware that I had different emotional responses to subversive behavior from male subordinates than from female ones: with men, I tended to feel keenly threatened, and had to fight the impulse to respond in an exaggeratedly stony, steely way (so as to demonstrate how tough and unfluttered I was), whereas with women I tended to feel indignant, and had to fight the impulse to respond in a way that involved figuratively rubbing their noses into the carpet for having the unbelievable cheek to challenge me. This was, of course, because I subconsciously perceived men as having more authority than women. I'm not sure whether this came through in my actual behavior--I was mortified even at the time to find myself having these feelings, so I sure hope it didn't--but it wouldn't shock me if one way or another it did. Years later, in my present career, I had an unpleasant experience of the reverse sort--unpleasant enough to provoke me to file a complaint with the dean, hopefully the only time I'll ever do so--with a similarly prejudiced interim department head, who was decidedly
not struggling to restrain her impulses. (And I wasn't even remotely acting subversive in that case, either...but, I digress.)
On a side note, though it's unfortunately sometimes presented in a crassly overstated way, I do think there's
something to the idea that social conventions governing female behavior--and therefore, the particular patterns of female-on-female aggression which result--vary somewhat across subcultural lines. Some of the most influential writings on aggression among females have been heavily criticized for basing their models on studies conducted solely among white, upper-to-middle-class girls and women, and IMO that's a valid criticism.