There are plenty of women writing about science, but their names rarely make it onto bookshelves or into the shortlist of the Royal Society's science book prize

I couldn't help being a bit disappointed by the shortlist, announced last week, for the 2011 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. From Alex Bellos's mathematical adventures to Sam Kean's poetic tour of the chemical elements, this is an inspiring collection of well-deserving books. But, yet again, all the authors are men.

This made me wonder how many women have been shortlisted for this prestigious prize since it was established in 1988. A quick glance at the society's website reveals that of 144 shortlisted books – six each year over 24 years – just nine were by women, with two others that had a woman as second author, including a husband-wife team. Out of these female authors, only one has won (the husband-wife team).

Dava Sobel was one of the nine, shortlisted for Longitude in 1997, but none of her subsequent books – even Galileo's Daughter, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize – was even longlisted. Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, an international bestseller and surely by far the best popular science book of last year, wasn't on the longlist either. As for British authors, Gabrielle Walker, who has written several acclaimed books including Snowball Earth, has never made the list either.

In any of these individual cases there could be a good reason why a particular book was not recognised. Much comes down to the individual tastes of the judges each year. But surely the overall statistics – only around 5% of shortlisted books are by female authors, with just one shortlisted woman in the last five years (me, since you ask) – show that there is a problem to be addressed here.

But what is that problem? It's possible that the judges are biased towards books written by men, but I see no evidence for that. The panel always includes a healthy proportion of women and I'm sure they'd love to be able to recognise a wider range of authors.

A quick look at my own bookshelves suggests it may have more to do with the books the judges are presented with. Of maybe a hundred popular science books in my study, only five female authors are represented, mostly American: Rebecca Skloot, Dava Sobel, Mary Roach, Lisa Randall and Gabrielle Walker (plus Natasha Walter if you count the brilliant science section in her book Living Dolls).

Angela Saini, author of the recent Geek Nation, should probably be there too. But I'm shocked by how hard I find it to name any top British female science authors, whereas eminent men's names – from Martin Rees and Richard Dawkins to Matt Ridley and Nick Lane – are literally falling off the shelves.

This isn't for a lack of women writing about science. When I took a course in science communication at Imperial College more than a decade ago, we often used to wonder why so many of us (around 25 in a class of 30) were female. I've since worked at both New Scientist and Nature, where the gender balance of writers and editors is very equal. Women are well represented at the annual awards of the Association of British Science Writers.

So are these talented women choosing not to write books? Do they find it harder to get book deals? Are their books taken less seriously when they're published? Do science writers tend to move on to books later in their careers, when women's professional goals have often had to take second place to childcare?

Similar questions are being posed in every field where women are under-represented at the highest levels, but with books so crucial for bringing science to a popular audience, I think it's important to ask them here too.

If we want science books to reach everyone, which presumably the Royal Society does, then surely we need to be encouraging and recognising books by the widest possible range of authors, with the widest possible range of voices. That includes ethnic minorities, too. It's impossible to tell from the online list of shortlisted names how many are white, but from the writers I know I'd say almost all.

I'm not suggesting that the judges should reward second-rate books just because of the sex or race of their author. But perhaps they could seek out eligible books that haven't been entered – including ones that treat science in a non-conventional way, like Living Dolls or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – and invite the authors to enter, rather than simply choosing from the male-dominated books that are presented to them.

Jo Marchant's book Decoding the Heavens was shortlisted for the Royal Society prize in 2009