Girls, not guys, are responsible for pressuring girls out of STEM subjects (anecdotal)
Let me preface this is some important info. I studied engineering where my final class boasted an amazing ratio of 1 girl to 27 guys. The only girl in my class, topped it and was offered the best job. What I'm about to say has absolutely nothing to do with competency of women in the field, because in my experiences, women are just as, if not more capable than men. It's anecdotal but I often find that people deliberately misread my arguments as if its an attack on women, that 'they don't belong' or some other nonsensical garbage. I'm only saying what I have noticed. Perhaps people reading this will feel they noticed the same thing.
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TL;DR
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The amount of boys and girls enrolling in STEM subjects is massively biased because of bullying that happens during early high school years and this is the only timeline worth investigating to solve the issue of low participation rate among women in the STEM workplace. Girl and boy nerds suffer extreme peer pressure to stop being nerds and to fit in and be 'cool'. Guys have larger support networks and stronger resilience against the peer pressure from other guys than girls do. When girls are suffering bullying from other girls, they suffer positive feedback loops and the social isolation is much stronger because of it. At the same time, girl-on-guy bullying and peer pressure against nerds is very common despite being relatively ineffective while guy-on-girl bullying against girl nerds is far rarer, but has a large effect due to the social isolation already inflicted by other girls.
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I find that when people talk about gender disparity among STEM subjects at uni, they are looking at the problem well after it began, and trying to solve it so late is pointless. Truly, the amount of women who are enrolled in STEM subjects at university is irrelevant since you have to complete prerequisite subjects in order to even get accepted. So what actually matters is how many women were studying physics, maths and chemistry in their finals years of high school because this is the sole determining factor in how many women apply in college, no one chooses those subjects for the fun of it. It's done with intent. The disparity between women enrolling in STEM in university and those who elect those subjects in school when students branch out from core subjects is the same, so this is clearly where the problem begins.
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As a guy, I can say that I copped plenty of abuse for being a nerd at an all boys school. I got it all, from being told I'll never have a girlfriend, being picked last in sports teams etc, all the usual stuff. But absolutely none of it phased me. Of course I wasn't the only one, many guys in my year were the same. With extreme stubbornness, we continued to be nerds and in some cases, dug even deeper in order to own that insult. Almost no one was successfully pressured to do anything different. Then when girls came along, ages 16+ things started to change. Guys would lie about their subjects in front of women and some of the less extreme nerds would drop out of the STEM subjects once they got girlfriends and they turned on those who stayed. Catching the bus every single day and overhearing so many conversations it wasn't hard to figure out that the girls really didn't like nerdy guys. The guys who were stubborn were completely unaffected though and kept going.
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Then there were the nerdy girls I knew. The ones who liked anime, Pokemon and science (before 'I Fucking Love Science' existed). Honestly, the abuse these girls copped from other girls was worse than directed at any guys. Total social isolation and endless teasing behind their back. Very few girls were capable of withstanding it, you'd be lucky to find more than a few in any given year level as so many were pressured out of it, the social isolation was too strong. Those that did stick it through typically ended up doing brilliantly. A total counter to the bell curve with what seemed to be the only girls studying it, were all at the top of their class. This isn't normal, it shouldn't happen in unbiased scenarios. It would certainly imply that all the 'weaker' girls were bullied out of it.
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The whole time this was going on though, there was a stark coincidence. Not once in my entire years at school among the nerd brigade, did I once see a guy, mock a girl, for being a nerd. Yes of course they mocked girls for everything appearance related and some of it was brutal, but I never saw a guy tease a girl for doing homework on the bus. Meanwhile every goddam day was the same teasing from other girls. Mocking guys and mocking girls, always the same while the guys did dumb shit like throw stuff out the window and have passing cyclists catch up to the bus and threaten to beat the kid up.
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So it made me think, why are boys so much more resistant to anti-nerd bullying, and why were women outnumbering guys so much harder when it came to pressuring people not to study STEM subjects? If we assume that girls are just as likely as guys to study STEM subjects, this would imply that women are pressured out of it harder than guys which in my experiences came from girls 99% of the time. If we assume that girls are less likely than guys to do it, we need to look at whether that difference is by nature, or by nurture.
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So we look at the influences on young peoples lives. There's three main things, friends, family and teachers usually in that order. Whether people like it or not, a teenage girls friends will usually be considered more important to her, than her family. For girls that go to all girl schools, it is entirely probable that they will have 100% female friends and 100% female teachers. If you were to get any given teenage girls' top 5 persons who influence their life, there's a damn good chance 4/5 of them are their friends + mother with 1 being a father. It is possible that these influences encourage girls to tease guys for being nerds, and it inevitably turns against other girls. The fact that all-girls schools have quite a low proportion of girls studying STEM leaves only 2 options, that girls by nature choose not to study STEM, or that girls are pressured out of it. Remember you have to only consider this time in their life, who is pressuring them out of studying these pre-requisite classes?
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I believe that the reason there are so few girls who go on to study STEM subjects in school is a bullying feedback loop. Nerdy girls are made to feel alone and outcast, so they stay away from it. For every one that succumbs to the insults, that makes the remaining even more isolated. Repeat until you have whittled down a dozen STEM interested girls in year 10, down to 2-3 by final year. If however the lack of girls studying STEM in high school is by nature, that doesn't explain the unnatural distribution of women who succeed in the fields. Whether or not that is true, a bell distribution should follow which in my experiences, it is not even close to. Meanwhile, the number of guys being called nerds remains high despite the bullying, so attempts at social isolation are far less effective, since they'll find more friends among themselves. This leads to the idea that all the lesser-performing women were pressured out of it and I have to say, I have never once seen a guy, man, or male of any age tease a woman about studying maths. I witnessed it every single school day for 5 years, coming from girls though.