Ever wonder why Alexa is not Alex, which could actually be a nickname for either gender? It's actually ironic that a company with a name derived from a fierce warrior race of women just fell into the standard practice of casting the helper who takes orders from the user as female. In fact, the AI agent's name is derived from Alexandria, a city whose claim to fame in the ancient world was its library, according to Daniel Rausch, the head of Amazon's "Smart Home" division. He told Business Insider that it is to capture the idea of the original collection of volumes that housed "all the collective knowledge of the world at that time." But they could have just as easily considered the fact that the city was named for Alexander the Great, and gone with the name Alex, a nickname adopted by men and women.