Looking through the talk pages, I found this interesting note: This is an important subcategory, but Wikipedia's categorization guidelines clearly state that s

Looking through the talk pages, I found this interesting note: This is an important subcategory, but Wikipedia's categorization guidelines clearly state that subcategories defined by ethnicity or gender are non-diffusing. As such, American women novelists should be listed here as well as in the American novelist category Which implies that if the wikipedia editors were following the basic rules, adding the sex-specific categories wouldn't do anything to solve the "this list of novelists is too long" problem.