I was tenth in my class of 300 with straight As in math and science, wanted to go to U Mich for pre medical and then medical school, and was counseled to become a nurse instead (not a nurse with a bachelor of science degree, "just" a nurse).
Why?
Because becoming a doctor was "a long road to hoe for a woman."
Because I was "destined" to marry and have kids, and nursing was "handy to get a job with" after my kids would be in high school if I "became bored" in not having to look after those children so much any more.
Because it "wouldn't be fair to take up a space a man needed" in order to be able to get a good job and support his family.
You like that last one? Said to me with a straight face in the late 1950s. It was a time when women were still practically chattel when married off to a man, whether or not he was going to have a good job and support a family. To that counselor, higher education of a woman held all the merits of educating a kitchen drawer full of pot stirring implements. What's the point of a smart kitchen drawer, everything you need is in there somewhere, probably. Just rummage around and take what you need.
Welcome to enforcement of outcomes sans even the equal opportunity.
Fortunately I had a grandmother who said the polite equivalent of **** That and encouraged to me to go to college and major in whatever the hell I found interesting.
As it turned out, even though I doubled back and did two years' worth of pre-med courses after college while working in tech fields in support of investment banking and contract law, etc., I ended up rejected from med schools as a 31-year old applicant, female, with all manner of deficiencies I'd not imagined I had... Duke's medical school even stipulated that they felt they "owed it to the community to provide doctors with the longest possible period of productivity." Yale put me on the waiting list and encouraged me to reapply the next year. I thought about that for a minute and realized in a year I was going to be a year closer to a perhaps more subtle version of the letter I had already got from Duke.
See Duke University (and all med schools) ware operating at that point after a lot of civil rights laws had kicked in, so they couldn't just come out and repeat the old saws offered me by my highschool counselor back in what I figured were the dark ages. But seriously, imagine my surprise at some old white guy still trying to ring up a reprise of the dark ages way out into the 1970s.