Women in college are getting the message that majoring in some of the most lucrative fields may make it harder for them to marry or have kids.

Female college students surveyed by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said they believe women who major in science or business suffer a “marriage market” penalty relative to those who pursue humanities or social science degrees. Specifically, the women surveyed said majoring in science or business would reduce their chances of being married at age 23 by 10% and their odds of being married at age 30 by nearly 15%.

The notion that women who major in these fields may be less likely to marry earlier doesn’t appear to have much of an effect on whether women actually choose those majors. But the female students’ perceived relationship between a career in business and science and having children does. The women surveyed said they believed that pursuing one of these more lucrative fields could reduce their expected number of children at age 30 by about 48%. That knowledge makes her 12% less likely to choose a business or science major and about 25% more likely to choose a humanities major.

“It’s these differences in fertility over the life-cycle which are sort of pushing females out of science and business and into humanities,” said Basit Zafar, a research officer at the New York Fed and one of the authors of the study.

Read: The big reason women drop out of engineering isn’t in class

Of course, it’s dangerous to read too much into the findings. The researchers surveyed about 500 students at New York University, hardly a nationally representative sample. The female respondents also didn’t indicate that becoming a scientist or businesswoman would completely preclude them from marriage or childbearing, instead it would just delay the process, which fits with broader trends of later marriage and childbearing in the U.S.

Still, the findings are troubling because they indicate that college-age women may be internalizing signals that a career in some of the highest paying and in-demand fields could make it more difficult to marry or have a family.

It’s easy to see why that’s the case — young women have very few places to look for examples of successful women in the science, technology, engineering and math fields. Women account for about 30% of workers at the nation’s largest tech companies. Some of the most visible women in tech regularly face public scrutiny over the way they manage their work and home lives.

Catherine Hill, the vice president for research at the American Association of University Women (AAUW), said that in reality, computing, engineering or other scientific fields aren’t intrinsically any worse in the work-life balance department than other high-pressure jobs with higher shares of women, like law or medicine. But there may be more cultural issues at play in these industries that make it more difficult for women to marry and become mothers.

“There’s a broader sense of discrimination in these fields,” she said. When compared with other sectors, many of these fields have a much larger gap between the way men and women view gender norms, according to previous AAUW research, Hill said. The men in these sectors tend to be more traditional and the women tend to be less so, she said. “There may be some challenges in the workplace where people have such different perspectives.”

Many point to this unconscious bias in the technology and engineering industries as a reason why women may struggle to get hired and move up in what they perceive as a hostile environment. “When you look at women who left engineering and women who stayed in engineering they’re not that different,” Hill said. “What’s different is the women who left were unhappy with the workplace climate.”

Some companies are working to address this, but girls get signals way before they enter the job market that they may not be suited for a career in these sectors. Just 21% of female characters on prime-time television have careers in STEM, compared with nearly 79% of male characters, according to a 2012 report from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and the Media. Things like that may explain why women are less likely to major in, say, engineering, than men, despite the fact that middle schoolgirls are actually more proficient at using their skills to solve technology and engineering scenarios than their male peers.

It’s hard to say what exactly is influencing students’ choices to pursue a particular field, and since Zafar’s results only speak to a small slice of the college-going population, he said he’d be curious to see how these factors play out in the broader college world.

“In economics we have all these models” about what influences the marriage market, for example, he said. “But we don’t really know what students are thinking when they’re making these choices.”