I had a very similar experience growing up. We weren't poor, but I was the oldest of 5 kids, so resources were thin. Instead of toys that would be out of fashion in a month, my mother would get junk from Goodwill and the Salvation Army (broken vacuum cleaners, VCRs, etc) and my father would let me use his tools to disassemble the stuff. I don't remember ever really fixing anything, but I do remember the joy of tearing a machine down, examining the principal components and reasoning about their function. I don't know if I had a natural disposition that my parent's guided, or if their solution for keeping my quite and entertained had just rewired my brain, but that activity has had the single greatest impact on my life. No it didn't lead me to a career in vacuum repair, I'm a programmer (a C programmer... so the vacuum repairman of programming).

I don't know what to think about the gender angle... my mother is sort of a Rosie the Riveter figure. Incredibly self sufficient, creative and industrious. The only point of contention that I remember, between her and dad, was how she would never put his tools back after using them. He eventually assembled a secret 2nd set of tools.

Lol, I just had a flashback of a funny exchange that was the result of my fearless tinkering. I was a Marine infantry machinegunner, in Fallujah 10 years ago, with a broken long range AN/PAS-13B thermal-optic gunsight. The battalion armorer was about an hour's drive away, and the odds of getting ambushed on the road were pretty high at the time, so I really didn't want to muster a convoy for one broken piece of equipment. Instead, I grabbed a headlamp and a leatherman - then headed to the only place where you could get some privacy: the shitter. I had to do this in private, because the Corps really frowns on this sort of thing - PAS-13s are expensive. I'll never forget the look on the company commander's face after he pulled back the shitter curtain to find me in the dark, wrist deep in the PAS-13's guts. "Corporal... are you operating outside your echelon of maintenance?" I hesitated, trying to figure out what the captain wanted to hear. "No sir?" He stared for a couple of seconds, probably trying to figure me out in the same way, then slowly lowered the curtain back into place. I managed to fix it though, one of the few things I ever tore down and returned to a functioning state.