A study of 6,000 children’s books found that from 1900 to 2000, adult women and female animals could be found in no more than 33% of the books published in a given year, but adult men and male animals were present in up to 100% of the books. 57% of books had a central male character, but only 31% had a central female character.

This reflects the age-old publishing industry wisdom that while girls will read books about boys, boys will not read books about girls. From a young age, girls are subtly taught that while a male character can represent their lives and interests, a female character could never do the same for their boy classmates.

And it doesn’t stop in childhood—or in children’s books.

Author Nicola Griffith took it upon herself to research just how many big prize winners (think such career-defining accolades as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) are by women and about women. The answer, unsurprisingly, is a resounding “not many.”

Take the National Book Award, for example. From 2000 to 2014, male writers writing about men won eight times, which outnumbers the combined awards given to women writing about women (two), women writing about men (two), and women writing about both men and women (three). The Man Booker and Pulitzer Prizes given in that time frame indicate similar skewing: more men won by writing about their own gender than women won by writing about any and all genders.

This division permeates every level of literary production and consumption. Yearly statistics released by VIDA, an organization advocating for women in the arts, consistently highlight both the absence of female book reviewers and the absence of female authors being reviewed in magazines.

The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), for example, reviewed 330 books by female writers in 2010...and 1,036 books by male writers. In response to the published statistics, the TLS editor, Peter Stothard, said that while “women are heavy readers,” the books they read are “the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS.” He went on to say that the TLS only reviews “the most important books.”

But even when women do get their books reviewed in big-name publications, those reviews are often biased. The New Republic studied the words that varied between reviews about female authors and those about male authors in reviews from 2010 to 2015.While the words distinguishing reviews about men included “war,” “nation,” “universe,” “politics,” “history,” and “human,” the words that distinguished female-centric reviews from their male counterparts included “sister,” “daughter,” “mother,” “husband,” “marriage,” and “beauty.”

If by chance high-brow literature written by women succeeds amongst the general public, it is quickly lambasted by critics in a phenomenon that writer Jennifer Weiner calls “Goldfinching” after The Goldfinch, a 2014 novel by Donna Tartt that received this treatment in the media. These types of reviews debate whether the books in question are really, truly literature (never mind the—as seen above, statistically unlikely—trail of major literary awards in their wake).

In the time-honored tradition of belittling what is enjoyed by women and girls (see: boy bands), these reviews heavily imply—if not outright state—that the readers responsible for the books’ meteoric ascents are simply stupid.

At the end of the day, great literature is supposed to be about the so-called human condition, a way for all of us stumbling through complicated and messy lives to feel less alone. But it is increasingly apparent that for the gatekeepers of literature, often the very people whose names perch on the lofty bylines of literary reviews, the human condition is inherently male.

Whether conscious or not, the message is that male authors write books about what it means to be human, but female authors write books about what it means to be women.

But as writer Katherine Angel puts it, “there is no view from nowhere.” Men are just as influenced by their gender as women—it’s just that their bias is accepted as the baseline.

Think of placing an empty container on a scale and then resetting the scale to zero to better measure the weight of contents put into the container. This does not mean the container has no weight; it means that the container’s weight is not registered by the scale. The worldviews of male writers are similar false zeros: They are only the starting point because they have been set as such.

So next time you browse a bookstore, consider picking up a book by a woman, about a woman. And if you’re hesitant to do so, consider why that is.