In a result that has warmed many a literary feminist’s heart, Hilary Mantel was last week awarded her second Man Booker Prize for the stunning novel Bring Up the Bodies. In Australia cockles had already been pre-heated by Anna Funder’s win earlier this year, taking out the Miles Franklin Award for All That I Am.

At a time when there’s so much gender fury being expressed in other areas of public life, these results might be taken as proof that things are better in the world of literature. Sadly, such an optimistic conclusion would be mistaken. Mantel and Funder’s wins are still very small waves breaking against a powerful literary tide; an overwhelmingly male tide.

In 2011 the US organization, Women in Literary Arts, known as VIDA, published a survey of the world’s major literary journals. VIDA compared the numbers of books by men and women that were reviewed in these publications, and the gender of the reviewers.

The results may have been startling to some, but they only confirmed what many others had long suspected. In every publication VIDA surveyed, men wrote the majority of book reviews, and books written by men were far more likely to be the subjects of those reviews. In most cases the disparities were quite staggering.

Earlier this year the industry journal Bookseller and Publisher compiled a similar survey of reviews in Australian publications and, barring one or two exceptions, they came up with results that were depressingly similar to the VIDA statistics.

Literary prizes are no different. Funder’s Miles Franklin win was only the 14th time that the prize has gone to a woman since 1957 (and four of those were won by the same woman, Thea Astley).

It’s difficult to dispute the conclusion that, both here and overseas, books written by women receive far less attention and fewer accolades than those written by men.

Of course books aren’t unique in this respect. Wherever men and women share the page, it is men who dominate. Take a critical look at the writing credits on the plays and the films you watch, or the bylines in the major news articles and opinion pieces you read, and you’ll notice something depressingly similar.

But what makes this underrepresentation of women in the world of literature particularly paradoxical is that women fuel the literary world. They buy more books than men. They read more fiction than men. And they dominate our nation’s book clubs.

So why is it that male writers are more likely to get the attention, not to mention the all important reviewing gigs? Unless you agree with the novelist V. S. Naipaul that men are simply better writers than women, you have to concede that something unjust is occurring.

Unfortunately, there isn’t one simple explanation for the disparity. After hearing from the enlightened Mr. Naipaul it would be easy to imagine that it’s all down to a bunch of misogynistic editors, smugly rejecting anything written by a woman. But that assumption would be wrong.

The fact is, we’re all still immersed in a sexist cultural soup that makes things harder for women in almost every area of public and professional life (equal pay, anyone?). The world of literature is not immune to this.

But there are also subtler, more insidious forces at work here. Women’s stories are often valued differently to men’s. If a man writes well about domestic issues he stands a good chance of being lauded as a keen observer of modern mores. If a women does the same thing her work is likely to be ghettoized as “chicklit”; more a patronizing slur than a genuine genre description. Women’s own lack of confidence is also a factor. It takes a tremendous amount of self-belief to write a book and see it through to publication, something that too many smart, talented women still lack.

In an article in the UK magazine Mslexia, the neuropsychologist Cordelia Fine pointed to yet another factor; the impact of what psychologists call “stereotype threat”. Simply put, if aspiring women writers see fewer female authors winning prizes and being showered with praise, they will formulate lower expectations in regard to their own writing, and this will impact not just on their confidence, but also on their ability.

If this is correct then promoting women’s writing is not just about getting more women published. It’s about helping them to believe that they really can achieve excellence.

For the past two years I’ve been working with a group of women to do just this, by inaugurating a major new literary prize for the best book written by an Australian woman. We have just announced a call for entries, and the $50 000 prize will be awarded in April next year. We’ve called the prize The Stella, as a cheeky salute to Stella Maria Miles Franklin, one of many women who have felt it was safer to hide her gender when publishing.

Our aims are broader than simply awarding a prize to one author. We want to inspire more women to write, and to believe in what they have written.

It isn’t just about numbers or statistics. It’s about fairness, and a better result for everyone. Because when we undervalue women’s writing and women’s voices, either consciously or unconsciously, we don’t just do women a disservice, but all of society.

Monica Dux is the co-author of *