Are guys secretly intimidated by strong women?

yes

I really do have to agree with armyant.

Before I get started, let me say that I am deeply attracted to intelligent, strong, goal-oriented women. I consider myself to be a fairly bright engineering student who wants nothing more than to date an intelligent woman who understands me and my dry sense of humor.

In my experience, many women who refer to themselves the way you do, actually just come off as pretentious and insecure. I had an internship this past summer at an aircraft company and there was this other intern who came off this way. She took everything too serious, was always late for things because "her work was more important than ours," and would rattle on in front of us about how after graduating (from her private engineering school, MSOE) she was going to be a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. And than she was baffled when nobody was impressed/cared. Whenever we went out to bars, she would talk about how intelligent she was.

On the other hand, the other female intern was a humble genius. I enjoyed just being around her. She didn't make a point of telling everyone her accomplishments, and believe me, they were pretty impressive when I found out. She was not so insecure that she needed to make sure everyone around her knew how smart she was.

To summarize, men like women who are intelligent and driven for the same reason women like men who are that way. But its a huge turn off if you make a point of it. Just think of guys that only talk about themselves during dates, showing no interest in you, and think that having a high paying job and "such a great personality" will win you over.

I don't know if you are this way, but in case you are (or anyone else reading this for that matter), be honest about who you are, but don't volunteer the information. Let him find out on his own. He'll like you even more for managing to be so humble.

I prefer them.

It's not really about weak or strong, it just happens that all the women I ever met who said men were "intimidated" by them were a combination of obnoxious, opinionated, argumentative and insecure (which exhibited itself as a need to toot their own horn and congratulate themselves on degrees and whatever). Men that possess those same qualities are usually known as assholes and it's no secret that women aren't attracted to them either, so I don't think we need to create a new adjective for a female asshole.

There's usually a gap between what a guy likes, and what his friends/family/society says he's supposed to like.

Some guys close this gap by telling friends/family/society to go to hell because he's going to go be happy. Other guys, are simply fools.

hahahaha @armyant, he has that completely CORRECT!