Female vs male authors-is there a difference?

About two weeks ago a Nobel laureate publicly asserted that no woman writer could be his equal. Below is just one article on his comments.

"VS Naipaul finds no woman writer his literary match-not even Jane Austen"
By Amy Fallon
The Guardian
Thursday June 2, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/02/vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers

Jane Austen

This story made me think about all the great writers out there and whether or not you can discern simply from reading their work if the author is a man or a woman. I'd like to offer a few examples from the French and Francophone literary world that contradict Mr. Naipaul's key assertions that 
1) women's writing is overly sentimental and 
2) women have a narrow world-view due to the fact they are not true masters of their homes.

• Yasmina Khadra's Les Agneaux du Seigneur (In the Name of God) brilliantly complicates the question. Athough "Yasmina" is a female first name, it is actually the pseudonym of a former Algerian military officer. This novel depicts an Algerian village in the 1990s torn apart by civil conflicts over the appropriate role of religion in daily life. There are few female characters and even less sentimentality. It shocked many readers who were unaware of the author's pseudonym because women were supposed to be isolated from the brutalities he described.

• Yasmina Khadra's The Attack goes in the other direction. In this novel an Arab Muslim living in Israel discovers his wife (also an Arab Muslim) was a suicide bomber who caused the deaths of numerous innocent people. He was not particularly religious and didn't realize how important her faith was to her. While grieving her loss, he must also comes to terms with the terrible act she has committed. Virtually every page drips with heart-wrenching sentimentality.

• Chateaubriand's novels René and Atala capture the Romantic angst of early 19th century French literature. In these novels, and many others of the time authored by both men and women, reflect the "mal du siècle" or melancholy that came with the new century. The main characters are consumed by sentimentality and the struggle to find a meaningful path through life.

Chateaubriand

If sentimentality is the mark of women's writing, Mr. Naipaul should check out these examples. 

His comments also raise some excellent questions:

• Is there automatically a correlation between the author's identity and the topics he/she describes?

• If so, how much must a reader know about the author's background in order to understand his/her text?

• Can a reader "feel" the identity of the author bleeding through his/her writing? If not, why not?

• What do we make of texts that we think were authored by someone of one sex, only to find out we were wrong?

• Hélène Cixous theorized that there is such a thing as "écriture féminine" but what exactly characterizes "feminine writing"? Can a male writer adopt those characteristics? (She thought a few could.)

• VS Naipaul won the Nobel prize for literature, but he's also been criticized for his opinions on race and women. Should his talent absolve him of his shortcomings? Should Nobel prize winners be held to higher standards of conduct?