It does happen everywhere, in every field. And there are perceived stars in every field. STEM probably generates more of them, because people can actually attract money there, but the notion that fame and prestige bring license is pretty common across the board.
It’s not fair at all, but I don’t think it’s responsible for driving women out of STEM fields. Unless they find a field where men are basically absent, there’s nowhere to hide. Men do this to other men, too. I’m not aware of women doing it to men or to other women, at least not in the same way.
(I once counseled an undergraduate who was having an affair with a female faculty member, but she didn’t feel that she had been coerced into it, she felt she had initiated it. The issues came up when she had to deal with how driven, dark and depressed the woman she idolized really was. It was less a sexual harassment situation than a 19-year-old crashing into thirtysomething adulthood, and losing some illusions in the process.)
Meanwhile, those engineering numbers are interesting. There seems to have been little or no progress in getting more women into the field over the past decade and a half, but the suggestion in the NYT piece that women winnow themselves out on a relative basis is not borne out by the engineering data. Women got about 19% of engineering bachelor’s degrees. 22% of master’s degrees, and 24% of PhDs. The PhD numbers actually showed some meaningful progress, from about 17% in 2000 to 24% in 2009.