Different angle, but former & new CEO of TSMC Morris Chang, in a 2014 interview, talks about how he came to semiconductors: he looked around at what other asian businessmen were doing, switched from Harvard to MIT because no opportunities, examples open to him, & saw "no chinese American politicans, no chinese-american even businessman" (1949)[1]. Obviously this is no longer 1949, equal rights is literally the rule of the land in a fair part of the world. But it's a strong story of role models mattering, of doing what you see. And there are definitely still gender-roles prevalent within society, roles taken by masculine figures, roles taken by feminine figures, and people looking in the mirror are like to understand, to see themselves forward on paths where they can already see people who resemble themselves succeeding. Disrupt this, please, but to me, the pressures towards non-normativity are greatly outranked by the evidences & pressures of what we already see in the world.
Last, I'll throw in a shout out to Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota[2] series. It's a wonderful story from a Renaissance history professor, of a post-geo-governmental sci-fi world, of politics & great events. One of the interesting flourishes of the book is that the world has largely decided to make gender taboo. To adopt a willful genderblindness, to try to treat everyone equally, to regard to everyone with non-gendered pro-nouns. The world has worked to undo the pre-dispositions set up, actively, rather than merely requiring a legal treatment. It's an interesting detail of the world, & causes no end of tension & complications for the characters of course, which is just one part of this wonderful interesting highly interwoven saga. It speaks to the difficulty of the social science happening in this article, to the impossibility to build a control group that could ever test out how sex shapes us, because so much of society is suffused with it. Even in the Terra Ignota world, where a agendered Puritanism has taken over, the old roles still have root, even though they are illegal, & must hide. When people talk about their anecdotes of boys & girls having different behaviors, I think they must just be so blind to how much influence, how many opportunities for messaging, how much of a status quo the world has, how much they are up against to provide that equal chance.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEh3ZgbvBrE#t=29m https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611648