The aspect that showed more differences was in heroism, which is “defined as risking one’s life for the welfare of other people” (188). In an analyzation of the Carnegie Hero Medal award recipients, only 9 percent of them were women, while 57 percent were women who were willing to “undergo pain and potential medical problems, in order to help another person,” in another aspect of the award (188). The Righteous Among the Nations category, showed that 61 percent of the recipients were also female, who “risked their lives during the Nazy holocaust to save Jews” (188).
Like Alice Eagley and others who performed this study, I believe altruism exists because of social roles, especially because of the explanations and studies of communion and agency’s relationship to gender differences. According to the textbook, communion is often stereotypically linked to women, and is defined as “a concern for our relationship with other people, while agency is more often idealized as a masculine trait, and is “a concern with your own self-interests,” although women’s scores in agency have recently increased (50). Because of reasons like these, gender differences only occur due to cultural pressures, whereas they would not if it were not without these social forces. While men may externally display communionism less than