Please, please, whatever you do, take this headline with a pinch of salt. Because of COURSE writing, simply typing or scrawling or whatever you might do to get your words across and your story heard, doesn't take any set of genitals to do it.
However, a pretty sexist literary world means that women's writing isn't taken as seriously as men's writing. And there's proof: a female author, Catherine Nichols, sent a novel out to 50 literary agents, she recieved two requests for her manuscript (or should that be WOmanuscript?)
Convinced her novel was much better than that, she set up an email address with a man's name, sent the same covering letter and pages to the exact same 50 literary agents, and got 17 replies.
Simple maths shows, then, that being a man makes you eight times as likely to get published.
In an essay about her 'Homme De Plume' for Jezebel, Catherine said: 'He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.'
'The judgments about my work that had seemed as solid as the walls of my house had turned out to be meaningless. My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me – Catherine.'
The solution? Not only do we need to encourage more female writers to write, and more women to become literary agents and editors, but we also need to big up female writers. Too much of the literary world's women writers are encouraged to do the old beach holiday rom-coms, with too many powers that be thinking that readers will only ever be interested in a woman writer if she sticks within that 'womanly' remit. While these books totally serve their purpose, they can't be the only sort of literature people are interested in getting from female writers.
And it's infuriating for women looking to tell their stories. As Catherine puts it: 'In theory, the results of my experiment are vindicating, but I feel furious at having spent so much time in that ridiculous little cage, where so many people with the wrong kind of name are burning out their energy and intelligence.'
Reading a good book by a female writer? Talk about it, spoilers and all, big it up, devour all the other stuff she's written. Don't just assume a 'classic' book is worthy because it's written by a man. Think about the way people undo stereotypes. Because a world full of men's stories sounds like a world half empty.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Meet The Girl Who Started A Florence And The Machine Book Club
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.