Books: Is there a gender bias in the awarding of book prizes? 16/10/2012 , 1:11 PM by Lyndall Bell It's the subject of this week's book segment with Jon Page, who also tests out Jamie Oliver's whole '15 Minute Meal' claim. Gender bias in book prizes This is not a new debate. The Orange Prize, now known as The Women's Prize for Fiction after losing its sponsorship, was established 15 years ago to try and redress a gender imbalance in the winners of the Booker prize (15 out of 46 winners have been female). The Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded last week has had only 12 female winners out of 108. In Australia the Miles Franklin has only been won by 14 female writers in over 50 years, including this year's winner Anna Funder. The Stella Prize is being proposed to be the equivalent of the Orange Prize here. But the gender bias goes beyond literary prizes. Book reviews also favour more books by men than by women including our own literary pages in the SMH and The Australian. Added to the gender bias is a genre bias where female genre fictions is often dealt more harshly than male genre fiction. Fifty Shades and Twilight have been singled out often as being badly written and made fun of where as action novels like Ice Station or Jack Reacher are not. Genre fiction from both sexes also regularly gets ignored by literary prizes too despite a lot genre fiction being far