I have a resistance to assessing individual shortlists on whether they include women. (If the remit of judging panels is to reward literary excellence, they should be left to do so, without fear of being rebuked for failing to “honor diversity.”) But the historical disparity between the number of male and female literary prize winners is certainly worth noting. The Booker (now the Man Booker) Prize has been given to a woman 17 times in 45 years. The Pulitzer Prize for fiction has been given to a woman 18 times in 67 years. The Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction has been given to a woman eight times in 33 years.

Does sexism have something to do with this? Of course. Prize judges favor expansive themes and “big ideas,” and they tend to find these things more frequently in men’s writing than in women’s. (Once, when I had a book shortlisted for a prize, a journalist rang to ask me if I was surprised that my “small” book had been so honored.) Such prejudice is not the sole explanation for women’s historically poor showing. Literary talent is bestowed equally on men and women, but literary achievement has traditionally been disproportionately male. Given the vast social and educational advantages that men have enjoyed throughout most of human history, it would be bizarre if this were not the case. The achievement gap has narrowed significantly over the last century, but it still exists. The self-belief ­— the grandiosity, really — that sitting down to write a serious literary novel requires is something our culture still tends to encourage more in men than in women. The obliging helpmeets who have traditionally made so much novel-writing possible are still more likely to be men’s wives than women’s husbands.

None of this strikes me, however, as a persuasive argument for regarding women’s fiction as “a cause” or for giving it its own award. I hate the idea of describing any sort of fiction as a cause. It makes it sound like something virtuous but fundamentally tedious that depends for its survival on the heroic efforts of concerned citizens. The Baileys Prize gives money and brings public attention to worthy writers, but it does so at the risk of institutionalizing women’s ­second-class, junior-league status. Cynthia Ozick famously swallowed her qualms about the value of a “circumscribed honor” when she found herself on the shortlist. “A prize is a prize is a prize,” she reasoned. For me, the more compelling rationale for accepting such a prize would be a monetary one: “£30,000 is £30,000 is £30,000.” (If there were significant prize money for fiction written by middle-aged women with brown hair, I’d be happy to win that too.) But there’s no doubt that I would be infinitely happier to win a contest that included male entrants.

I am told that this attitude marks me out as a feminist of an older generation — someone who still mistakenly equates achievement with the approval of “old white men.” I prefer to think it bespeaks clearsightedness. Anyone who tells herself that winning a women-only race is as significant a victory as winning one in which everyone competes is sentimental, or delusional, or both.

Zoë Heller is the author of three novels: “Everything You Know”; “Notes on a Scandal,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and “The Believers.” She has written feature articles and criticism for a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.