The imbalance in my reading habits – more than three quarters of all the books I have reviewed over the last 10 years were written by men – has been nagging at me. I wanted to explore whether this was just a case of being a sexist reader, or a symptom of something else going on in publishing and literature.

In the field of literary prizes there is strong evidence that novels written by women are less well recognised than those written by men. Since 1969, 35 men and 18 women have won the Booker prize in its various incarnations. It was the absence of any women writers from the 1991 Booker shortlist that led to the creation of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (although the jury that year was evenly divided in terms of gender). This two to one ratio could be better, but it could be worse: the Pulitzer prize for ‘distinguished fiction by an American author’, has been awarded 70 times since 1948. By my calculation only 18 of these 70 awards have gone to women writers, including such greats as Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and Donna Tartt. The Nobel Prize for Literature is no better – only awarded to women 16 times out of a total of 118 awards. This is not just a phenomenon of old-fashioned attitudes – in the so-called progressive decades of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s it was awarded only once to a woman. And only one woman has ever been Poet Laureate in the 400 years of the role’s existence!

Elsewhere the issue persists. In the BBC’s 2003 Big Read less than a third of the novels chosen by the public were written by women, and without JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson the ratio would have been far worse. Only 21 of the 100 best novels of all time written in English chosen by the supposedly progressive Guardian (which is where this blog began) were written by women. The issue is obviously endemic. Other than where specific action is taken to address the imbalance between men and women writers (for instance on some university courses), male writers predominate.

Which obviously begs the question as to why? In The Authority Gap Mary Ann Sieghart cites evidence that novels written by women are reviewed less often than those written by men, which starts the whole process of down-grading the value placed on books written by women. From what little evidence I have been able to track down, women are not published less frequently than men. But that’s not to say that women authors aren’t promoted less effectively by their publishers, placed less predominantly in book-shops, cited less often in academic works – it’s even possible that Amazon’s algorithms are sexist (stranger things have happened). To be clear, I have not identified any evidence of these things – but there is a pattern here!

It may be a statement of the obvious, but we shouldn’t have to accept this diminution of half of the population. All of the examples above are instances of people making decisions to exclude or downgrade women. So the solution is in some ways simple: all literary prizes should work towards being gender neutral. That means choosing to have a balance of women and men on judging panels (as many already do), choosing to long-list and short-list works by men and women evenly, and award prizes evenly, if necessary by having two different awards. As readers we can buy books by more women, review them as often as we review books by men, and try to avoid the discrimination, unconscious or otherwise, that has been going on before Gutenberg developed his printing press.

More on men reading women