most people would rather enjoy watching paint dry then listen to what my day job entails
I assume Dulux and the like will have STEM jobs where you basically do have to watch paint dry.
I work in IT and I've spent most of my career being the only woman.
I think one of the issues is that people don't know what many of us in STEM jobs do. I'm a unix sys admin, but most people outside of tech won't know what that means (which is installing, configuring and managing large computer servers.) Apart from teachers, medical staff and forensics on detective dramas, we don't often see depictions of people like me on TV. It would be easy to do in a soap opera, have a computer worker of some sort who worked from home (because on soaps, I think the sort of work is partly dictated by hie available it will make you for storylines.) A noral person who just happens to work in IT or whatever. But what we actually get is the IT Crowd and the Big Bang Theory, which both promote the stereotype of socially awkward, geeky male. People aren't going to say, "you're really good at that thing you're doing, have you thought about a career doing ?" if they have no idea what jobs are there. And a lot of them can sound totally incomprehensible and/or totally dull to people with no experience of it. (I was going to say "to outsiders", and that's probably an issue, too - I think there can be an "us and them" attitude with some people working in STEM.)
There’s a ton of other reasons why women don't tend to enter STEM careers. I do think one of them is that women in STEM are constantly told about all the barriers against them, (sometimes, girls deciding to take a non-STEM path seems very rational in that light,) but most of my male colleagues have never once been asked to represent the company at careers fairs or to think about how they contribute to the industry & company culture, and what they could be doing to make it all more inclusive. How nice to have that privilege, and just be able to think about your actual job all the time.