"Male authors outnumber female writers by a staggering 66 to 27..."

... on a list of the top 100 books, based on a survey of 5,000 employees of Waterstone's bookstore who were asked to name their favorite books written since 1982. (Waterstone's, Britain's largest bookstore chain, opened that year.)

Is this disparity in the sex of the authors really something that should stagger us? Do you demand an explanation? What do you think of this one?

Jon Howells, a spokesman for Waterstone's, ... said: "Women read more than men - the core customer is a woman aged between 35 and 55 - but what they read is right across the board: chick lit, crime fiction, biographies, heavyweight novels, and they don't care about the gender of the author.

"Subconsciously, I think men stick to male writers. They think that what women write doesn't appeal to them."

Yeah, blame men! You sure don't want to just give men credit for writing better books! It's got to be men's fault somehow that the list came out this way. Start with that premise, then work out an answer. You know what you've got to do to get along in this world. Whatever the results show, it means that women are superior. Your job is to say why.