Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they're even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they're confined.
It's like if a young woman writes it, then it's chick lit. We don't care if she's slaying vampires or working as a nanny or living in Philadelphia. It's chick lit, so who cares? You know what we call what men write? Books.
It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.
Something we do know is that review coverage does go to male authors more than women authors. That's a fact. I think it's one of those examples of unconscious bias: If you hire a lot of male journalists, they're more likely to pick up the latest Ian McEwan novel than the latest A.S. Byatt novel.
Some of the writers I've praised are Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elisabeth George and Minette Walters. Strangely enough, almost all are women.
It is difficult to get men to pick up a female author. Women will read men, but men won't read women.
Because I'm a woman writing about women who do bad things, that's somehow very 'other.' When men write that, it's called a novel. It's just a book.
Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.
I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.
As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men.
I have a lot of men who will say to me, 'I don't read books by women, but I like you.'
I’m not interested in teaching books by women.
