DO YOU NEED a Y chromosome to be taken seriously as a crime writer? This question just won't go away, especially now as I prepare for this year's Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. My first event is, as it was in 2007, chairing the panel of shortlisted authors for the Crime Novel of the Year award.

The shortlisted authors are terrific, several of them are friends of mine, and they all deserve their places on the list. But why is Stef Penney the only woman?

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. The problem is not confined to any one shortlist. When this newspaper published The 50 Greatest Crime Writers in April, only 13 were women. (The half was part of the

Sjöwal and Whalöö husband-and-wife team.) As one of the four-person panel involved, I had submitted my own top 50. More or less half were women, but many didn't make the final cut. To be fair, several of the male writers I suggested, eg, James Crumley, didn't make it either.

Someone said I should be grateful that the writer who came out as No 1 was a woman: Patricia Highsmith. Then I saw the accompanying photograph, in which she is naked to the waist. Why? None of the men was stripped of clothes and dignity.

Denise Mina believes the problem is specifically British. She says: “Coverage in the UK is always gendered. In the States you talk about Foucault or the purpose of your writing and that gets into the papers. In Australia, you'll be asked “what's your manifesto as an artist?” In Britain it'll be: ‘How do you manage the housework?'” Mina says that she can talk over here for an hour about “the inherent politicisation of crime writing” and the interview will start “Unexpectedly petite and sprightly mother of two...'” When she was first published in the UK by Transworld, the only piece of advice she was given for dealing with the media was “don't mention feminism”.

The other woman on the Times Top 50 panel was Val McDermid, who won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award in 2006. She says that part of the problem is that “the overwhelming number of readers of crime fiction are women, but most of the people who write about crime are men. Women are still conditioned to defer. We are less likely to push ourselves into the limelight. And we are less likely to get our agents or publicists to run to the papers with every little thing we do.”

Women writers are often advised to use only their initials - or to pick an androgynous pseudonym - to avoid putting off male readers. J.K. Rowling is credited with getting young boys reading again. Would it have happened if she had been Joanne?

I was once asked on a live radio programme why any man would pick up a novel by someone with a name such as Natasha. Can you imagine a female interviewer asking why any woman would pick up a novel by a writer with a name such as Dick? Allan Guthrie, last year's hugely deserving winner of the Theakston award, offered one reason why men don't like reading novels by women during an event he, Laura Wilson, Martyn Waites and I attended at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Guthrie said then that he believes women are so relaxed about the idea of same-sex relationships that they don't mind reading about sex from within the mind of a man. But heterosexual men are so terrified by the very idea of sex with men that they can't bear to take the risk of having to encounter a love scene from the woman's point of view.

I think that it may have more to do with preferences for systematising or empathising and activity in the brain circuits around the paracingulate sulcus (see Matt Ridley's Nature Via Nurture for studies of what happens to this area of the brain when someone is reading), but Guthrie's idea is interesting. Whether or not he's right, there is a problem, and it's neither new nor confined to crime fiction. Mary Ann Evans chose a male pseudonym, and her contemporaries gave themselves the ambiguous identities of Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell. But George Eliot and the Brontës were born almost 200 years ago. Have we really progressed so little?

Natasha Cooper is the author of more than 15 crime novels, the most recent of which is A Poisoned Mind

The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate runs until July 13
www.harrogate-festival.org.uk/crime

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