Although women account for two-thirds of Australia’s authors, a survey has found that almost every publication analysed reviewed more men than women last year.

The Stella Count looked at the gender breakdown of the authors reviewed in more than a dozen papers in Australia, including the Sydney Review of Books, where the split was 64% male to 36% female, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, where the split was 61% male to 39% female, and the Australian Book Review, where it was 66% male to 34% female.

The greatest disparity was at the Australian Financial Review magazine, with just 17% of books by female authors. Only one publication analysed by the Stella Count, the trade magazine Books+Publishing, reviewed more women than men (65% female to 35% male).

This compares to a study of the Australian book industry in 2015 by Macquarie University, which found that women account for around 66% of the author population in Australia. When trade publishing was considered, the split was 72% female and 28% male.

The new analysis, compiled by the Stella prize, also found that male reviewers were “far more likely” to review books by men than by women. “In most publications, reviews by men of female-authored books constituted between 4-15% of the total review coverage, even when the number of reviews written by male reviewers outnumbered those by female reviewers,” said the report, adding that men generally reviewed books by men two or three times more often than books by women – a similar result to 2014.

The report suggests that “the tendency across review publications for male reviewers to review male authors rather than female authors perpetuates cultural biases that suggest that writing by men is universal, and writing by women is for women only”.

Australian publications also reviewed considerably more nonfiction by men, despite Macquarie’s finding that women wrote around 66% of the nonfiction published in Australia. At the Courier-Mail, 27% of reviews were of nonfiction by men, compared to 5% by women; at the Monthly, 30% of reviews were of nonfiction by men, compared to 8% by women. The Age/Sydney Morning Herald dedicated 36% of its total reviews to nonfiction by men, and just 15% to nonfiction by women.

“The fact that an imbalance in critical coverage persists, despite there being no underlying imbalance in authorship, creates and perpetuates the perception that nonfiction by males is more worthy of critical attention, in that it frequently deals with typically masculine topics such as war, history, economics and so forth,” said the report.

At the start of the year, research by Slate found that three-quarters of popular history works published in the US in 2015 were written by men. In the UK, meanwhile, in 2015 there were just four solo female authors in the top 50 bestselling history titles.

The Stella Count, which has been running for four years, was set up by the Stella prize, the A$50,000 (£29,000) literary prize for Australian women’s writing. It follows the launch of American organisation Vida, which has examined the gender split of reviewers and authors in literary publications for the last six years. This March, Vida revealed that space for women on literary pages had increased very slightly over the years it has run its count.

Veronica Sullivan, manager of the Stella prize, said that the team at the Stella Count has “definitely seen an increased awareness of issues of gender disparity in Australian reviewing culture”, attributing this to its own analysis.

“Over the past few years, many literary editors have told us they’ve undertaken to improve their publications’ coverage of female writers. Readers are keeping their own tallies of review coverage in the publications they read regularly, and sharing them on social media to keep the conversation going publicly. And I know of several excellent, high-profile critics who have taken private pledges to only review books by women for a year, in an effort to address the imbalance to the degree that they can,” said Sullivan.

“Cultural change takes time, as so many of the underlying causes for the disparity in reviewing coverage received by male and female authors are due to unconscious bias. No one is intentionally disadvantaging female writers, but the fact that these attitudes are so deeply ingrained makes them difficult to dismantle, and is itself the problem we’re seeking to address. That’s why it’s so important that these discussions are ongoing, and that’s why we continue to release the Stella Count annually: in the hopes that it can help to bring about this change over time, even when the results of individual publications often aren’t improving markedly year-on-year.”

The Stella prize was launched in 2013, and Sullivan said it had made a difference. In 2011, just 10 individual women had won the Miles Franklin prize in its 54-year history, with all-male shortlists in 2009 and 2011. Since the Stella was founded, every Miles Franklin winner has been female, with an all-female shortlist in 2013.

“It has also very much broadened its scope in terms of what kinds of books and subjects are considered ‘of the highest literary merit’. On the 2015 shortlist, four out of five books on the shortlist were by women – but even more heartening is the sorts of books that are receiving acclaim: contemporary stories about families, told from children’s points of view, using the family as a microcosm of our society to discuss important subjects such as poverty, domestic violence and sexual abuse.”