There's some basis to the idea of environmental messaging around female STEM activity (the kind which makes "female" its primary objective, STEM secondary) being potentially damaging to female performance in those subjects.
A quote from Virginia Wolf in "A Room of One's Own" summarizes the notion of stereotype threat (assessment of individual ability/performance as based on stereotypes for the group to which the individual belongs) as a contributory factor to female self-efficacy and performance in math.
"There was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually. Even if her father did not read out loud these opinions, any girl could read them for herself; and the reading, even in the nineteenth century, must have lowered her vitality, and told profoundly upon her work. There would always have been that assertion—you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that—to protest against, to overcome."We haven't come far since the 19th century. Research by the Unviersity of Waterloo and Stanford (
https://nuovoeutile.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Stereotype-threat-Spencer-1999.pdf) finds that:
"...lowered expectations in response to continued stereotype threat in a domain, and the demotivation this causes, may be critical precursors to disidentifying with the domain—that is, to dropping the domain as an identification and as a basis of self-evaluation."
The article is worth reading in its entirety, but here's a Cole's notes discussion. Citations in the article on pp.24-26 link you to the source material for these arguments.
Reasons the authors forwarded to explain the potential role of stereotype threat in the interpretation of gender differences in math (proxy for STEM) ability:1. Access to the same classes and curriculum doesn't equate to the same experience of education, or access to it, for boys and girls. Different classroom treatment of boys and girls, combined with societal socialization of females, could lead to wide differences in achievement for similar ability boys and girls.
2. The experience of testing or assessment in various classroom, competitive, and professional settings may varies dramatically for boys and girls (and, later, men and women). High stereotype threat proximal to performance is expected to have a higher negative effect on performance of the stereotyped group. Situations such as high-stakes testing, admission to competitive STEM clubs, or open participation in classes by girls could feed stereotype threat.
3. The impact of stereotype threat is positively correlated with the perception that an assessment is a fair measure of ability, as it links to self-perceptualization.
(Side note: This could explain, in part, intra-family differences in STEM performance between male and female siblings who receive comparable instruction, and yet who are exposed to stereotype threat by a primary attachment figure. It may not be that girls "just aren't interested", but that they have been tacitly told, through subtle social cues, that outcomes in their performance are expected to be low.
Conversely, it could explain high levels of STEM participation in girls-only schools, because of the envirionmental absence of stereotype threat.)
4. These effects would be expected to persist and magnify as females enter expanding social environments, in which the likelihood of exposure to stereotype threat by a significant figure (a mentor, supervisor, or high-performing group of peers) increases.. This dovetails with the outsized incidence of impostor syndrome among high-achieving females and is consistent with continued female drop-out from STEM fields.
Anecdotally, I attended an all-girls' school for middle and high school, and there was a disproportionate amount of female achievement in STEM and technical fields. Within my personal circle of friends are a female cardiologist who has published extensively before 30, a senior officer at the Federal Reserve Bank, an academic neurologist at an Ivy league school, several engineers who have been promoted quickly in their areas of specialization (cardiac medical devices, nuclear reactor design, fluid dynamics) or received tenure well ahead of schedule, and a prominent entomologist.
There was, doubtless some serious selection bias at play in this example. But, it speaks volumes that these young women came from a graduating cohort of just over 60 graduates, from families that believed in female equality. (Most families had at least one parent in a quant field, with both parents actively supporting the daughter.) In this environment, the label "girls in [insert club]" was never appended to the activities, because of course it was only girls! In a mixed-gender environment it is difficult to replicate the elimination of exposure to stereotype threat sufficiently to produce similar results. My classmates and I graduated with the mindset that we were capable individuals, and this environmental messaging--at a critical developmental time in the formation of self-concept--seemed to disproportionately inoculate us from impostor syndrome later in our careers.
Tying up this ridiculously long-winded post, it seems that activities which minimize stereotype threat would go a long way to supporting engagement of all of the most talented students in STEM, and ensuring that their achievement aligns well with their innate ability.
*cough, tldr*
