Misogynistic might be a bit strong. Dismissive possibly. The thing is they can only choose winners from writers that they've actually heard of - and there have always been more published male writers than female ones. I think partly that's the literature - reading public's fault - whilst women tend to be very open to reading books by male authors, a lot of men seem not to want to read books by female authors. So the publishers have to reflect what the public seems to want - consequently most of the female names in Borders are on the front of pink covers and have usually written something involving shoes and biological clocks. If I was judging from that I'd probably assume that women didn't write serious literature either.

1) "Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the "First Lady of Physics") disproved the law of the conservation of parity (1956) and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel . Wu assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development—with Chen Ning Yang—by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. She did not share their Nobel Prize—a fact widely blamed on sexism on the part of the selection committee. Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a sine qua non reference for nuclear physicists." "Lise Meitner contributed directly to the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 but received no Nobel recognition . In fact, it was she, not Otto Hahn, who first figured out fission, after having analysed the accumulated experimental data and successfully incorporating Bohr's liquid drop model (suggested first by George Gamow) at its theoretical base, with Otto Robert Frisch's participation: Niels Bohr did in fact nominate both for the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, besides his recommendation of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Hahn. The case served up as an interesting contrast case to that of Louis, 7th duc de Broglie's Nobel deliberations, circa 1929 (Prince de Broglie was regarded then as something of a dilettante in physics): in particular, of the ways the Nobel Committee gave weight and judged between male and female contributors and their work. Hahn and Meitner had also managed to independently discover a new chemical element (protactinium) in an earlier collaboration. There was a third known junior contributor Fritz Strassmann who was not in the Prize. In his defense, Hahn was under strong pressure from the Nazis to minimize Meitner's role since she was Jewish. But he maintained this position even after the war." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies There seem to have been sexism in the past. 2) "If you take a look at some of the big literary prizes over the past 30 years, you'll notice a trend: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: 68% male winners, 32% female winners Nobel Prize in Literature: 87% male winners, 13% female winners National Book Critics Circle Award: 62% male winners, 38% female winners PEN/Faulkner Award: 86% male winners, 14% female winners Booker Prize: 69% male winners, 31% female winners" Source: http://bookblog.net/bbarchives/2003/08/gender_bias_and_literature.php It don't seem just to happen only for the Nobel Prize.