Favorite Books and Gender

A few weeks back the Guardian asked readers what their favorite science fiction book is. Some 500 readers responded. A few days later it was pointed out that of the 500, only 4% were written by women. It has been widely pointed out that this is appaling and efforts are being made to bring more women authors to mind when readers are asked for favorites.
I feel raw over the whole thing. I was one of the 500 and I answered honestly that my favorite book is Heinlein's 'Time Enough For Love'. And it is. This is my proverbial desert island book. When I was in the hospital, this is the one that Jodi knew to bring to me. It's not a perfect book but it speaks to me. And damn it, I shouldn't have to defend why something is a favorite of mine.

So why was the gender split so heavy towards male authors? It's impossible to tell the gender of most of the responders but I'd guess it was heavily male. And favorite books are usually books that have stood the long test of time. Back before the 70's, science fiction was very dominated by men. A boy's club if you will. I don't know enough about the history of the period to tell why this was or what changed it but there it is.
The other piece of this is that most readers responded with science fiction as opposed to fantasy writing. In fact, most fantasy leaning ballots were somewhat apologetic. Well, for a long time there has been a pretty drastic split between men writing hard science fiction and women writing fantasy. I don't know why that is but there you have it. If you ran the same piece and asked for fantasy writing (and excluded Tolkein) you'd almost certainly get a majority of women authors.

But let me go back to the outrage here. It isn't hard to picture an open ended question that gets an overwhelming response for women. If you asked the readers of 'O' for their favorite novel of the last 50 years what would you get? Whatever response there was, if it favored women 19-1 it would not be an outrage.
I'm in favor of gender equality overall and I don't want women authors to face a harder road than male ones. I'm in favor of going back to the more sexist times and finding gems that were unfairly rejected. And I'm not opposed at all to lists of books that people think are worthy and underread.
But. Stop calling me sexist because my favorite book was written by a man.