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Dystopia / YA dystopia may well be a good place to start - YA dystopia is doing very well right now and I'd say most of the bestselling books/series are decently written, so if she's not completely opposed to reading about 16-year-olds, then anything from The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) to Divergent (Veronica Roth) to the Uglies series (Scott Westerfeld) to Matched (Ally Condie) might do well. Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi, which I didn't care for that much, was also one of the more recent YA dystopias that actually had a bit of a scifi feel to it, which I didn't necessarily get from any of the other abovementioned books (apart from the Uglies, perhaps).
Wyndham's The Chrysalids is a good example of older dystopian fiction (which really didn't feel dated at all when I read it last year), while Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is a good example of a more literary kind.
Other than dystopian books, I've always preferred adventure-oriented scifi to hard science and technology oriented scifi. Granted, now that I think about it, I haven't actually read a great deal of books - some Alfred Bester, some old Soviet scifi - apart from the Babylon 5 and Doctor Who tie-in books (lots and lots of those), but I rather think those work best for fans of the respective TV series.
I might not be a "typical woman" (whatever that is), but I don't generally care for much romance in my scifi (or fantasy), so I'd hesitate to recommend romance-heavy scifi just because the potential reader is a woman.
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