Haven't you written that she is not applying to places like Harvard because the students there are too competitive? There would be more men there who are not intimidated by smart women.
In my meandering experience, hypercompetitive people don't like to hang around with people who might remind them that they might not be #1 every time. Especially if the hypercompetitive ones are male and the other ones are female.
It's true generally for hypercompetitive men, I think. I still remember one of my neighbors being relatively upset that I had a higher SAT score than he did. He really though of himself as #1.
Amusingly enough, the only person who I encountered in middle school who was faster at math computation than I was was a girl (from some other school...I have no idea who she was).
I was more surprised that someone *could* compute faster than I could than the fact that it was a girl, since I was used to sandblasting soup crackers with no effort prior to that.
Granted, I was already used to the idea that there were people who were more intelligent than I was, but then again my neighbor and childhood friend was the national spelling bee champion.
