But some of the most acclaimed female novelists have written unapologetically and authoritatively about women. And the environment needs to be receptive to that authority, recognizing and celebrating it in order for it to catch. It seems no coincidence that some of the most esteemed women writing today — Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Marilynne Robinson — came to prominence at an unusual moment in time when the women’s movement could be felt everywhere. Stories, long and short, and often about women’s lives, suddenly mattered to the cultural conversation. This period, the 1970s and to an extent the early ’80s, initially appeared to create an entirely different and permanent reality for female fiction writers. Men were actively interested in reading about the inner lives of women (or maybe some just pretended they were) and received moral kudos for doing so. Whereas before that a lone woman might be allowed on the so-called men’s team, literary women began achieving critical mass and becoming more than anomalies. But though this wave of prominent authors helped the women who followed, as time passed it seemed harder for literary women to go the distance. As Katha Pollitt, the poet and literary critic, says: “I think there’s always space for a Toni Morrison or a Mary McCarthy, but only one of them at a time. For every one woman, there’s room for three men.”

Cue the thunderous disagreements and the counter­instances, of which there are always going to be a notable handful: Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith, being two current examples. “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” by Jennifer Egan, won both a 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and is rhapsodically talked about by both sexes. In 2009, Elizabeth Strout won a Pulitzer for her linked stories, “Olive Kitteridge,” a collection that book groups love and that women have reportedly given to the men in their lives, who have sometimes, to their own surprise, embraced it. And, very occasionally, a true “event” is made out of a novel by a woman, most recently “The Tiger’s Wife,” by Téa Obreht.

These exceptions might lead us to think maybe we’re heading toward some kind of literary idyll in which men and women sit beneath trees in the sun, eating figs and debating passages by Kiran Desai or Jeanette Winterson. But just as women are suddenly fighting anew for access to contraception, the VIDA statistics suggest that women writers are still fighting to have their work taken seriously and accorded as much coverage as men’s. The American Academy of Arts and Letters counts only 33 women among its 117 literature members. Even prestigious literary prizes don’t necessarily change everything. In the past three years more than half of the National Book Critics Circle awards have gone to women, and in the past two years the National Book awards for fiction have gone to women — Jaimy Gordon and Jesmyn Ward — but so far neither has made an enormous cultural splash.

“I think the prizes for men just underscore something already there for them,” Lorrie Moore, the novelist and short-story writer, said. “In many cases the prizes themselves may not have as much independent power as corroborative power.”

Jane Smiley, who won a Pulitzer in 1992 for “A Thousand Acres,” said: “When I think about my own work, I think that it maybe falls between two stools, and sometimes this is good and sometimes it’s bad — not making the money that Jodi Picoult is making, not achieving the status of Franzen or Wallace. Nevertheless, one of the great things for our generation of women writers is the freedom we’ve felt to write about whatever subjects we wish to write about. Are we less innovative than the guys? I don’t see that. But if men aren’t much in the habit of reading women, then it doesn’t matter how innovative we are.”