It must have been a tough few days for Gail Trimble, the shy, square, brainy 26-year-old classicist from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who led her team to victory in the final of University Challenge last week. In previous weeks she had scored 825 of her team’s 1,235 points.

Trimble has variously been described as “smug”, “brain-rupturingly irritating”, “an annoying bitch” and “a horse-toothed snob”, though some bloggers and commentators found her “sexy” (phew! That’s all right, then). The smuggery and so on were apparently betrayed by the tilt of her head; she was also judged to be terribly patronising because she sometimes said “well done” to her team-mates.

Several pro-Trimble observers asked themselves whether Gail was “the female Stephen Fry”. She isn’t – Stephen Fry’s giant brain comes served up with a giant helping of wit – but the comment tells you all you need to know about the scarcity of clever women in the public eye: apparently there doesn’t exist another woman alive to compare Trimble to, though a couple of people said that she was maybe a bit like Joan Bakewell. Nice try, but only in the sense that both have breasts.

For the past few months I’ve been having a discussion with an old friend who is moving back to London from abroad and is wondering where to send his daughters to school. The daughters, being clever, have sat a load of exams and have been offered an embarrassment of places at a dazzling array of different schools.

My friend, not unreasonably, wants to send his perky, intelligent daughters to good schools that encourage their intellects and don’t turn them into mini-Wags, teenage shopping addicts or druggy party girls. Basically, I think he’d quite like a school where the majority of girls were Gail Trimbles, with a few nonGails scattered about for jollity.

It turns out that when you trot through a school these days, the Gails are thin on the ground – not because they don’t exist, but because braininess is no longer considered much of a female virtue or even an asset. So they’ve been tucked away. Whereas once the Gails were brandished with pride – we have Gails! Send your child here! – now the Gails don’t show you round your child’s potential new school unless they also have legs up to their armpits and a boyfriend in a band. In which case, they aren’t Gails. Gailage per se isn’t enough – it’s considered off-putting. Why?

As it happens, I went to a school stuffed with Gails. None of us thought she was a Gail – we just thought that we were reasonably clever, and that being reasonably clever was a good thing.

Well, I say “we” – I got myself chucked out because the whole “too much eye make-up/all-night parties” thing suddenly became extremely alluring. Up until six months before that point, though, I really liked working and being good at things. I liked being rewarded for having done well, and I felt bad if I did poorly – not bad as in “my overambitious parents will beat me and lock me in the cellar”, but bad as in “I cocked that up – how annoying”.

Everyone I knew felt the same way: the acquisition of knowledge wasn’t regarded as naff or nerdy; being clever was seen as cool, and being thick as embarrassing. There may have been a few swots, but swots are part of life: nobody lined them up to laugh at them or call them names. Actually, that’s not entirely true, I must guiltily confess. At university we called them NatScis (students doing natural sciences) and Mathmos (mathematicians). The NatScis and especially the Mathmos are the only people I know today not losing their jobs.

It feels an incredibly off-the-pace thing to say – again, why? – but I still think the way I thought at school: clever people interest me lots; thick people, less. I don’t mind that they’re thick – they often have other marvellous, life-enhancing attributes that compensate. I just don’t want to stay up all night chatting to them. And I value intelligence above looks, both in men and in women. If someone can talk entrancingly, I don’t really care what they look like: their appearance is utterly irrelevant (personal hygiene is another matter – clever, quite ugly men, please note).

The difference between my school days and my older children’s is that somewhere in the intervening 30 years, being seen to be clever has become a shameful thing, a source of finger-pointing hilarity – especially if you are female, though not exclusively: somebody on Twitter (source of all wisdom) last week was telling me, apropos of Gail, that their super-brainy son was routinely beaten up at school, to the point of broken bones. He’s off to Cambridge, and girls have discovered him, so he’s happy now. But really – what a childhood: abused because you get excited by knowledge.

That people are threatened by clever women has always been a given, because there is no end to what people will choose to feel chippy about. But whereas women used to resist – whether by wearing dungarees or 1980s power suits – they now by and large concede, and go out of their way to conceal their cleverness, or to hitch it to something manageably female, such as clothes or make-up or having a baby (“I was quite clever, but then I had a baby and now I’m amazingly stupid! My brain has turned to absolute mush! Ha ha ha!”).

The Gails, in their serviceable frocks and flat shoes and scrubbed faces, with their specs and old-fashioned hair (undyed, unhighlighted; just, you know, hair), are all but invisible. No wonder there’s such a furore when one has the temerity to pop up on primetime television.

It turns out Gail has been asked to do a shoot for Nuts magazine, the tits-out, cor-darlin-don’t-mind-if-I-do magazine for men who, one gets the impression, don’t perhaps have much sex in real life. She turned it down. There will be many further offers: magazines, newspapers and television programmes will be queuing up to give Gail a “makeover”, to make her “sexier”, “hotter”, “trendier” – all of which are euphemisms for “less obviously brainy”. I really hope she manages to resist all offers and just quietly gets on with her doctorate.

As anyone vaguely observant might have noticed, Gails are on the up. Girls who can write computer code are the future. All hail the Gail!

+ Stacey Pearson, 13, was sent home from school last week for having the wrong shoes. Christ Church secondary school in Ashford, Kent, was having a “uniform purge” and took exception to her black Kickers, which have pale pink stitching. Stacey said she’d been wearing the shoes since last September with no complaints.

The school’s “pastoral support manager” told her that she could go over the stitching with a black pen, wear a pair of black school plimsolls or go home. She chose to go home.

This is a subject close to my heart, as my son has been feuding with his teachers about his black trainers, which he also has been wearing to school for months, without complaint. If you were to crawl along the ground like a beetle, you might notice that the trainers – which have laces – differ minutely from standard school shoes.

The trainers – not pink stilettoes with marabou trim – have become a bee in the school bonnet, to the point where, at a parents’ evening, one teacher was more interested in them than in my son’s mock GCSE results.

I initially refused to buy new shoes because my son appears to be growing by an inch a week, so they’d be a waste of money. But my son’s father, who edits a men’s fashion magazine, came to the rescue. He is now sporting a £300 pair of last season’s Helmut Lang.

Is this not completely absurd? Do schools really have nothing better to worry about than rogue footwear?

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