> It's purely parents projecting gender roles onto their kids.
I don't think this statement can be made so strongly. There is certainly debate within the academic community on this topic. For instance this meta analysis[0] found an extremely large gender difference along the "people/thing" dimension, which could easily explain why more men are in STEM.
Of course, the person is not the population, so it's obviously very possible that while on average women tend to be more people-oriented that your daughter is more thing-oriented and drawn to STEM.
But I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from your one experience that gender roles come entirely from parents. It could just be that 1) your daughter would be interested in STEM regardless of how she were raised and 2) at a population level that's less common (which is not to say rare) in daughters than in sons.
I don't think this statement can be made so strongly. There is certainly debate within the academic community on this topic. For instance this meta analysis[0] found an extremely large gender difference along the "people/thing" dimension, which could easily explain why more men are in STEM.
Of course, the person is not the population, so it's obviously very possible that while on average women tend to be more people-oriented that your daughter is more thing-oriented and drawn to STEM.
But I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from your one experience that gender roles come entirely from parents. It could just be that 1) your daughter would be interested in STEM regardless of how she were raised and 2) at a population level that's less common (which is not to say rare) in daughters than in sons.
[0] http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x