Books featuring male narrators have received significantly more prestigious literary prizes over the last fifteen years than those written from the perspective of a female protagonist, author Nicola Griffith discovered.

Griffith, a British-American novelist who lives in Seattle and who has noticed the disparity in prizewinners since the 1990s, examined the last fifteen years’ worth of results for fiction awards for the Pulitzer Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Hugo Award, and the Newbery Medal. Griffith compiled the results in several graphs, ordering them by the gender of the winners and their protagonists’ genders. Looking at her graphs, one can see that zero Pulitzer Prize-winning books were written by a woman and from the perspective of a woman. In the case of the Man Booker Prize winners, only two books by women were about female protagonists, with one other book by a woman featuring protagonists of both genders; the remaining 12 prize-winning books of 2000–2014 were written from the perspective of male protagonists.

“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, when it comes to literary prizes, the more prestigious, influential, and financially remunerative the award, the less likely the winner is to write about grown women,” Griffith wrote. “Either this means that women writers are self-censoring, or those who judge literary worthiness find women frightening, distasteful, or boring. Certainly the results argue for women’s perspectives being considered uninteresting or unworthy.”

“Women are more than half our culture,” Griffith added. “If half the adults in our culture have no voice, half the world’s experience is not being attended to, learned from, or built upon. Humanity is only half what we could be.”

Griffith hopes that others will also analyze and contribute award data in an effort to learn about our own “patterns.” “Data is the key,” she said to The Guardian. “We have the tools now to accumulate, analyze, display, and share easily. Data will show us patterns. Patterns will lead to correlations. Correlations will lead to possible causes. Causes will help us find solutions.”