Despite protestations to the contrary, hard SF is a boys' club that is undermining its own potential by resisting the contributions of women writers.

There's a logical fallacy in this club's claims that it welcomes women members, which is rather like the rhetoric of the well-schooled military officer. Of course they want women in the army. It's just, well, a soldier must be physically strong, naturally violent and preferably have a todger so you can pee standing up. Any woman who fulfils those criteria is more than welcome to take the king's shilling! Women writers are more than welcome in hard SF, assuming they have a background in the hard sciences and value hard logic to the exclusion of all emotional experience. And while it's not compulsory to have a personality at the far end of the autistic spectrum, it certainly helps.

Not that there are no women who fulfil these criteria. But it's the implicit male chauvinism of SF that has alienated many of its greatest women writers. Margaret Atwood has consistently railed against being pigeonholed within the SF genre despite writing some of its greatest work. Alice Sheldon became one of SF's most significant writers under the pen-name James Tiptree Jr, in a period when the biased belief that women could not write SF caused US author Robert Silverberg to state categorically that "on the basis of his writing" Tiptree could not be a woman. As a consequence, hard SF continues to be less than the sum of its parts, a genre that succeeds in investigating the revolutionary potential of science and technology, but fails in understanding the emotional complexity of that revolution.

In her debut novel vN, Madeline Ashby takes on that perennial trope of hard SF, the android. Ashby's androids are Von Neuman machines, capable of self-replicating and hence a credible model for artificial life that could arise as a consequence of nanotechnology. Significantly, the three generations of vN at the heart of this novel are also all female. Ashby's vN are not constrained by Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. Instead, they have been engineered with a much more debilitating weakness: empathy. Unable to bear the suffering of humans the vN are enslaved by their own kindness as servants, wives and often far worse. In Ashby's expert hands vN cuts a painful incision into the emotional complexity of oppression in our society, and the way love can feed the worst kinds of hate. vN is a powerful novel and a fine exemplar of exactly the perspectives chauvinist SF so often stifles.

Tricia Sullivan is the writer of some of the most conceptually complex novels in contemporary SF, and recently reissued as ebooks. Her 2003 novel Maul nests a satire of consumer culture, in which teen girl-gangs conduct gunfights in the makeup department of a giant shopping mall, inside an examination of biotechnology, the ethical consequences of medical testing on humans, and the extreme male brain theory of autism. Lightborn, from 2010, a post-apocalyptic zombie story of AI brain implants gone haywire, features Xavier, a young man-boy on a mission to find a steady supply of the drugs that inhibit his puberty. Sullivan sets up a rational explanation for Xavier's obsession, but nonetheless takes great glee in toying with her maturity-phobic male lead. Men who never grow up, live in video games and fail to communicate their emotions to the outside world – it's almost as though Sullivan has something to say about SF geeks.

M John Harrison is not a woman. But he does write that rare beast, SF that includes women as real flesh-and-blood human beings. Harrison's characters, both male and female, are flawed creatures finding ways to cope – or not – with the shattering impact of technology on the comfortable fantasy we call reality. Light, its sequel Nova Swing, and now Empty Space – released this month – form an almost unique body of work, a trilogy that succeeds in fusing the conceptual density of SF with the emotional complexity of literary fiction. That's not a mere technical challenge, but a necessity for any literature that seeks to understand what it is to be human in a reality shaped by science and technology. Which is, of course, now the task of all literature.

There's nothing more likely to infuriate a hard SF fan than confusing their rigorous, scientifically grounded genre with the namby-pamby made-up magic of high fantasy. But chauvinist SF creates a comforting fantasy world of its own. One free from emotional complexity, and hence largely free of women. The reality of our technological future is that it presents an enormous challenge to our psychological and spiritual state as humans. If we're to find real insights into that challenge, it won't come from the narrow escapism of chauvinist SF. If the genre is to fulfil its potential it must not just encourage women writers but focus intently on the contribution they have to make.