My anecdata as a female engineer who's only sibling is also an female engineer. A quote from Dude's article that resonates with our experience -
"Fathers' gender stereotypes are very important in supporting or in undermining daughters' choices to pursue training in math and science," Davis-Kean said.
I'd go further to say that it was both of our parents though. Both of our parents challenged the stereotypes in many ways. That combined with our attitudes of - 'if someone tells us that we can't do something or that something is too hard, it just makes us want to do it even more'. Times that by 100 if "for a girl" was involved. Not sure how much of that was innate or learned but we both have it in abundance which has served us well in our fields
In choosing that path we often joked that we did it just to tick him off (he dealt with the fallout from poor engineering decisions in his job and cursed engineers often). Joking aside, he was proud. That said, I was pretty much going to do what I wanted and as long as that involved being self sustaining and out of their house my parents were happy.
