Originally Posted by aquinas
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:

[quote]"...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."

A meta-analysis found that stereotype threat is not hurting the performance of girls in stereotyped domains:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25636259
J Sch Psychol. 2015 Feb;53(1):25-44. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2014.10.002. Epub 2014 Nov 13.
Does stereotype threat influence performance of girls in stereotyped domains? A meta-analysis.
Flore PC1, Wicherts JM2.
Author information
Abstract
Although the effect of stereotype threat concerning women and mathematics has been subject to various systematic reviews, none of them have been performed on the sub-population of children and adolescents. In this meta-analysis we estimated the effects of stereotype threat on performance of girls on math, science and spatial skills (MSSS) tests. Moreover, we studied publication bias and four moderators: test difficulty, presence of boys, gender equality within countries, and the type of control group that was used in the studies. We selected study samples when the study included girls, samples had a mean age below 18years, the design was (quasi-)experimental, the stereotype threat manipulation was administered between-subjects, and the dependent variable was a MSSS test related to a gender stereotype favoring boys. To analyze the 47 effect sizes, we used random effects and mixed effects models. The estimated mean effect size equaled -0.22 and significantly differed from 0. None of the moderator variables was significant; however, there were several signs for the presence of publication bias. We conclude that publication bias might seriously distort the literature on the effects of stereotype threat among schoolgirls. We propose a large replication study to provide a less biased effect size estimate.

KEYWORDS:
Gender gap; Math/science test performance; Meta-analysis; Publication bias; Stereotype threat; Test anxiety