The gender ratio of the authors on the New York Times Best Seller list is one way to gauge how being a female writer today might be different from 70 years ago, in Shirley Jackson's time. The Best Seller list is the equivalent of the Billboard Hot 100 for literature, tracking the weekly 10-15 best-selling books since the 1940s. By taking the set of books that made it onto the list each year and looking at the gender of the authors, we can track the changing relationship between author gender and commercial success.

A new character is joining the Mr Men and Little Miss series - a female engineer. Little Miss Inventor has been created as a "positive role model" for girls, its author and illustrator Adam Hargreaves said. She will be the 36th Little Miss character and joins the likes of Little Miss Sunshine and Little Miss Magic.

As a child, the characters I looked up to were Disney Channel stars such as Lizzie McGuire, who I loved for her kindness and independence, or the members of girl bands such as Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls, who always struck me as strong and in control. The females who my peers and I would pretend to be in the playground were Hermione Granger from J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, or Buffy Summers, the resilient heroine of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Looking back, I can see that these role models weren’t perfect, but I can also see how much I needed them. Just seeing these powerful females showed me that I was capable, too. This is why role models matter.

While books by women made up about one-third of the most read self-help books, the remaining two-thirds were written by men. Yet with only a few exceptions, books by women were mostly read by women – on average 83% of readers were women. Books with male authors get an even split of 50% male and female readers.

Once again, the London Review of Books “has the worst gender disparity”, with women representing only 18% of reviewers and 26% of authors reviewed. The LRB’s figures have remained more or less consistent since the first Vida count in 2010, despite the publication telling the author Kathryn Heyman in 2013: “… there’s no question that despite the distress it causes us that the proportion of women in the paper remains so stubbornly low, the efforts we’ve made to change the situation have been hopelessly unsuccessful. We’ll continue to try – the issue is on our minds constantly."

I wondered whether the writers that I loved who thoroughly excluded women, such as Grahame and HP Lovecraft, were doing so deliberately or out of ignorance? I started an experiment to find out: choosing a work by each, I introduced female characters to see what that told me about their earlier absence.

Singh noted that it is important for children and adults to internalize these affirmations, and "sometimes we don't give enough voice to that and we don't teach that." The words of the book are "like an inner dialogue that we would hope our children would have about themselves," she added.

Gender bias is rife in primary school learning books and can be found, in a strikingly similar form, on every continent, various experts say. It is a problem "hidden in plain sight".

" What or whose view of the world, or kinds of behavior does the book present as normal? Why is the book written from this perspective? How else could it have been written?"

"The feminist message? Dream big, girls. They will set you free."

There are, of course, a multitude of ways in which parents can try to prevent their sons sliding into this slipstream. But all too soon, our influence is first diluted, then trumped by our children’s peers.

The Pack Horse Library initiative, which sent librarians deep into Appalachia, was one of the New Deal’s most unique plans.