It’s been known since the novel was invented that the imagined readership of fiction has been women, not men. Today, 80% of fiction’s readership is women, yet men seem to be winning all the awards. Yesterday’s event, “The Diversity Test: Gender and Literature in Translation,” sought to address this issue. Lorraine Adams, one of the event’s panelists, gave a telling anecdote: after informing one of her Princeton professors that she was going to write her paper on the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, he exclaimed: “Good! Fiction is for women and babies.”

The panel, led by novelist Claire Messud, was largely a response to Messud’s month-long fiction editorship at Guernica, where she prefaced her series with an essay about gender inequality in fiction....