When my female writer friends and I discuss our frustration over biases in the publishing industry, the conversation often revolves around age and gender. None of us is thirty anymore—or even forty—and we’ve never been men (and never will be, with perhaps one bold exception). That said, we believe men, both young and old, have an advantage over us because we’ve been told they do, and now, as female writers, we want a slice of the Man Pie.

Question is, how do we get it? We’ve discussed the pros and cons of presenting ourselves as someone we’re not, either by deleting photos of our aging selves from our websites, should an agent take a gander, or by adopting androgynous first names, such as Jess or Chris or Pat. Initials work too: A.B. Anything sounds like a man, but then so does J.K. Rowling. (By the way, her British publisher asked if she’d be willing to use her initials instead of her name—Joanne—maintaining that boys “have a sexist thing” and don’t like to read books by girls.) And then there are women who adopt masculine names, understanding that while those names may not necessarily suit them, they just might serve them—a notion the Brontes bought into.

Afraid that readers would judge their work based on their gender rather than their talent, the sisters adopted pen names in 1846: Charlotte Bronte wrote as Currer Bell, Anne Bronte as Acton Bell, and Emily Bronte as Ellis Bell. Emily, in fact, published Wuthering Heights in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell; her real name didn’t appear on books until 1850, when it was printed on the title page of an edited commercial edition. On learning that Ellis was really Emily, Victorian reviewers were shocked; they believed, apparently, that only a man possessed the talent to pen prose capable of arousing disbelief and scandal.

And yet. And yet and yet and yet. My friends and I still haven’t switched it up. Despite having selected our man names and boy initials, we’ve held back. I’m not sure why, but I can guess. We want to be accepted for who we are and what we are, despite the graphs and charts and percentages that tell us we’re outnumbered. We want to be the exceptions, the Dianes and Lucys and Jennifers, who’ve done it on our own. And when we get our pie, we’ll enjoy a slice and happily share it with the men.