The Guardian has an interesting article looking at a new wave of male authors who hide their gender. As one author, Sean Thomas, who writes under the gender-neutral name SK Tremayne, explains, he did this with the encouragement of his editor and agent "because it arguably helps, these days, for fiction writers to be female, or at least not male."
I believe people respond to incentives. Social scientists should pay attention when professionals are changing their behavior in response to a perceived change in incentives; as professionals, they are probably on to something. But is this evidence that the Puppy's are right about a conspiracy (explicit or implicit) against male authors? Not necessarily. My impression (not backed up by hard data; someone please correct me if I am wrong) is that the reading population is increasingly female in composition and that readers of all genders are disproportionately attracted to fiction written by members of their own gender. But it is evidence that the market for fiction as a whole is less biased against women than is commonly represented. Of course, to the extent that affirmative action movements like K. Tempest Bradford's Challenge to "stop reading white, straight, cis male authors for one year" take off, this only adds to the incentive to hide or misrepresent one's gender.
More concerning is the report that the authors felt that their attempts to write female characters would be considered more believable if they were not perceived to be men. Fiction should be judged on its merits, not by the identity of the author. But again this is no evidence of a conspiracy against men: women authors have had to obscure their gender for centuries in order to achieve acceptance by male readers (and as the referenced article points out, this continues today; see JK Rowling). Rather, it reflects the disturbing trend in society to favor form over substance, and to abandon meritocracy in favor of an allegiance to one's tribe.
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