My cousin's wife just became a nurse. 2 years of schooling, and her first job started her off at $80K a year. And since she doesn't work at a hospital, that's $80K for regular hours.
And she is just a regular nurse fresh out of school.
I was hanging out with this girl when this random guy approaches us in the parking lot asking for gas money, saying how he's forgotten his wallet at home. I am super wary of his story and am about to walk off. The girl with me doesn't. She wants to go in the ATM and get him some money. I let her do that and like you said, knowing the girl would go out of the way to help some random guy added brownie points for her in my book.
Of course, if I was being totally rational I may have considered the move dumb on her part. But my gut reaction was "cool chick!".
Most of human behavior, I would argue, is not conscious. We're conscious of the decisions we make, but not always about the ultimate (evolutionary) causes. And why should we? It's completely unnecessary for the evolutionary reasons for our behavior to be conscious, only that we act in a manner that will produce more copy of our genes.
It makes sense. The contest for status (i.e.. access to women) among men makes men a lot more mean-spirited and despicable than they would like to be, so a woman who is, or seems to be, "above the fray" is very attractive.
This explains the appeal of the female healer, the angel in the house, etc.
But to go back to our usual question of women-in-tech, people often remark that women tend to go into fields that are more "helping" i.e. medical professions, non-profits. In general, I think the implication that women go into more "helping" fields and men go into more revenue generating fields is used to paint men in a bad light; but here they've shown that women are being just as selfish when they appear to be more altruistic than men. After all, they're much more likely to do charity when a potential mate is watching.