Thank you Zhian for your detailed response and for your honesty. I do think our society makes it tougher for gifted girls (in some ways at least). I was a middle child with two brothers, and the way it played out was quite bad. My parents were immigrants with rigid sex role expectations, and even though like you I was a great student, never touched alcohol, didn't date, etc. my home situation became so bad I had to leave at age fifteen (luckily got myself into UCLA by exam, and managed to work part time and support myself while attending college). Several family friends invited me to stay with them until I was on my feet (essentially providing foster care from the second half of tenth grade -- when I left high school -- until I could get myself into college full time as a regular student). Even then my mom in particular was angry I wanted to go "straight to UCLA" instead of attending the community college first as she had done ("you think you are better than us"). Ultimately when I was admitted to Yale, even my dad had to laugh "YOU had to go to YALE!" (at least he could poke a little fun behind my mom's back). But it was seriously messed up. One of the problems was that my talents were in "male subjects" (math/science) and even as they pushed my brothers in those subjects (even though they were not interested), they tried to hold me back, as if my excelling in those made my brothers look bad. I remember getting a letter (for example) when I was in middle school from a JHU math talent search (for girls) and my parents threw it out. When I took SATs early in 10th grade, my parents started getting mail from Cal TEch and MIT, and they threw those out too. It took my parents years to come to appreciate that having a daughter talented in math and science is a GOOD thing. I remember in middle school my brother wanted to take a home ec class in school (they called it "boys foods") and my dad just about went nuts (expressing rather rudely the idea that this kind of thing could make his son gay).
On a brighter note, my middle son (now 15) will attend UCLA this summer (between 10th and 11th grade), and it makes me so happy he can do so, and under much better circumstances than I experienced. I also started UCLA during the summer when I was 15, but I did so as an emancipated minor, after having dropped out of high school (since I was no longer living at home with parents). I did manage to get admitted as a regular student about six months later, and it all worked out, but it was not easy. I do think being a daughter of immigrant parents made it especially tough, being "gifted" too. My parents already stood apart from "mainstream American culture" and they did not mind in the least imposing crazy restrictions on me that they never would have applied to my brothers.
