Fifteen years, but where are the ladies?

I hate making Pitchfork the scapegoat for everything wrong with music writing, particularly, music blogging, but considering that their list of best music writing was roundly criticized for having few female-penned books, it's incredibly disappointing that their 15 Writers/15 Songs feature contains exactly one song from a female artist. Katherine St. Asaph  wrote this on her Tumblr, and it got me thinking about the ways we as fans use music:

It’s still much rarer than it should be to spot more than zero or one woman on people’s lists of favorite musicians (or authors, filmmakers, etc.), and — unfounded speculation starts now — I wonder if it’s because people are more receptive to seeing female musicians’ work as good but not so much personally meaningful. There’s focus on musicians’ technical prowess, songwriting skill, etc., but it doesn’t seem to translate to repeat listens or to connecting with the music beyond simply admiring its construction as much as it could. The solution’s obviously for more people who do to write about it and write about it well, but then you crash into the writer gender ratio again. Ugh.

Had you posited before I started writing about music, before I began really paying attention to the lack of parity in the rock blogosphere, that fans find more person meaning in dude rock, but aren't averse to acknowledging a female musician's technical prowess, I would have probably said, "Don't you have that backwards?" I mean, when I read personal accounts of "records that changed my life," Exile in Guyville comes up, as well records from Le Tigre, Sleater-Kinney, Hole, Queen Laifiah, and hell, even the Spice Girls, but that's only because I rarely leave the (relative) safety of a few ladyblogs. I think there's definitely a lot of truth there, but it says more about the insular world of indie rock in which Pitchfork came to prominence.