Definitely. My bet is that the biggest issue is peer pressure which, honestly, is why I think top down efforts from parents and teachers and governments to boost girl's involvement in STEM are so ineffective. Most of the early development kids do in whatever field, be it sports or science, is driven by a need for approval (so are most other things at school). Unless you have a group of peers that you'd like to emulate and that you want to impress and engage with who are also doing science, you're probably not going to learn science. If the kids that are interested in science are otherwise not interested in anything you like (you like country, they like rock, you like comedies, they like sci-fi), then you're way less likely to end up studying what they do. A possible answer might be to make science clubs for girls, with awesome field-trips and awesome teachers. Physics can lead to, say, kinesiology and dancing, instead of making robots. Biology class can get outside of cell studies and into living animals. Chemistry can lead to molecular gastronomy, the development of organic hairdyes -- these kinds of things. These are the seeds from which the other studies can sprout: unless their planted, girls just won't be engaged.
In my research, and my personal experience, girls (in North America at least) shy away from the sciences well before they are in the running to become researchers. There's problems there too, but you hear more about them because the women thus affected have a lot more at stake and a way to make their voice heard -- not because it's a bigger issue. The slip seems to happen in Jr. High/Middle School, right when social pressures start to really mount. You can see this in some of the literature on mathematically precocious youth, especially regarding the disrupted relationship that girls have with mathematics confidence versus skill (with adolescent girls there is almost no, or in fact a negative, correlation, between their mathematical ability and their belief in that ability -- one might suggest this feeds into significantly reduced efforts in acceleration, extra-curricular work, harder courseloads, etc.)
In my research, and my personal experience, girls (in North America at least) shy away from the sciences well before they are in the running to become researchers. There's problems there too, but you hear more about them because the women thus affected have a lot more at stake and a way to make their voice heard -- not because it's a bigger issue. The slip seems to happen in Jr. High/Middle School, right when social pressures start to really mount. You can see this in some of the literature on mathematically precocious youth, especially regarding the disrupted relationship that girls have with mathematics confidence versus skill (with adolescent girls there is almost no, or in fact a negative, correlation, between their mathematical ability and their belief in that ability -- one might suggest this feeds into significantly reduced efforts in acceleration, extra-curricular work, harder courseloads, etc.)