I’ve mostly avoided the current rash of blogosphere discussion about bias against women writers because I have pretty much said everything I think needs saying. However, via a tweet from SF Signal I came across an article in the Washington Post that I thought worth quoting. The article is by Julianna Baggott, but the most interesting bit is where she quotes someone else:

Playwright Julia Jordan pointed me toward a recent study about perceptions of male and female playwrights that showed that plays with female protagonists were the most devalued in blind readings. “The exact same play that had a female protagonist was rated far higher when the readers thought it had a male author,” Jordan said. “In fact, one of the questions on the blind survey was about the characters ‘likability,’and the exact same female character, same lines, same pagination, when written by a man was exceeding likable, when written by a woman was deemed extremely unlikable.”

My guess is that if you had suggested to the people in the survey that they might be biased in their attitudes towards male and female authors they would have firmly denied any such thing. Nevertheless, the bias is there, and deeply ingrained. It won’t be easy to root out, because it touches way more than just books.