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Notes -
Related to this, I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=AsgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA210&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=nine%20out%20of%20every%2010&f=false
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235720134_Who_are_the_Heroes_Characteristics_of_People_Who_Rescue_Others#:%7E:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20males,%2C%20violence%20and%20traffic%20accidents
When it comes to men there's very much a tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
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