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Women writers are failing as much as ever to win the recognition they deserve, so they need the publicity the award brings I’ve never been a huge fan of the Orange prize . I’ve liked many of the books nominated, and I’ve enjoyed the awards ceremony because after the winners are ushered on to the stage with a burst of thumping, triumphant power chords, which is delightful. But on the question of whether the prize should exist at all, I have always agreed with AS Byatt that it was sexist. “It assumes there is a feminine subject matter,” she said. So why, this year, have I changed my mind? The past year or so has been a bad one for women writers. Not for writing produced by women. As always, lots of it has been excellent (and some has been terrible, much like the writing produced by men). It’s been a bad year for women writers because it has become more apparent than ever that they are failing to receive the recognition they deserve. The February publication of Vida research demonstrating the astonishing under-representation of women in literary magazines and criticism didn’t surprise me. I’d had many conversations with women writers to whom editors had expressed a lack of interest in publishing work by women. But I had hoped that it was just a coincidence that so many people I spoke to had witnessed these kinds of attitudes. Maybe less coincidental is the fact that an upcoming new anthology of short stories – a project I felt was really exciting – features work by a mixture of new and more established writers, 80% of whom are male. I was also perturbed to see that an LA Times article about the Orange Prize-shortlisted author Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad winning the National Book Critics’ Circle fiction prize last week was illustrated with a photograph of Jonathan Franzen, because, as the article’s headline – Egan Beats Franzen … – seemed to indicate, his loss was considered more newsworthy than her win. Then there’s the fact that David Nicholls’s One Day has been such a runaway success among both men and women, despite the fact that it succeeds as a novel because of its careful adherence to the tropes of so-called women’s commercial fiction (but, hey, it has a manly orange cover). It’s easy to come up with reasons other than sexism to explain why women seem to get short shrift. It’s just not especially easy to come up with valid ones, as TLS editor Peter Stothard demonstrated when he responded to the Vida data with the assertion that the 75% of books reviewed in his publication were by men because “we know [women] are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS”. Evidently, he means fiction written by women. I would like it to be possible for women writers to combat sexism simply by focusing on producing great writing. But then women have been doing that for centuries and the attitudes are still entrenched, even though, as Alain de Botton pointed out when the Orange prize was launched in 1996, there is nothing “distinctive from being a man when it comes to picking up a pen”. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that the experiences of male and female writers after they set their pens down are often distinctively different. That’s why I’ve changed my mind about the Orange prize. I still agree with Byatt that the idea of female-specific subject matter is spurious, but I don’t think that’s what the prize rewards. As long as women writers are forced to continue the exhausting battle for equal billing, they need the Orange prize to demonstrate the accomplishment and variety of their work. Orange prize for fiction Fiction Awards and prizes Jean Hannah Edelstein guardian.co.uk