This is probably it, there's even movies about it (Legally Blonde, etc). What's different there is customer-facing vs non-customer-facing roles, a lawyer who shows up in court in non-professional attire is going to get flak, and I don't know what the immediate female-heavy analogue for a back-of-office, not-customer-facing male-dominated engineer department. The usual examples of female-dominated professions like nursing and teaching don't fit that comparison.

But it's very disingenuous to call engineering low social status these days. Wearing Star Wars t-shirts or talking about computer parts and technology 24/7, yes, that will still receive at least some ribbing, if not more, but that's not the same as being an engineer by day. In my recent social experience, reaction after someone asks "what do you do?" is pretty uniformly somewhere on the positively-neutral-to-impressed spectrum.