https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/07/spy-books-by-women-stella-rimington-manda-scott-charlotte-philby

Publishing’s long established boys’ club in espionage fiction is having its cover blown by a new school led by Stella Rimington, Manda Scott and Charlotte Philby

When Stella Rimington, the former director general of MI5 and spy author, wrote a new foreword last year to The Spy’s Bedside Book, Graham Greene and his brother Hugh’s 1957 anthology, she was glowingly complimentary. She had just one complaint. “After everything we have done for spying, there is, apart from the obligatory reference to Mata Hari, hardly anything in this book about women!” she wrote.

The Greene brothers aren’t alone in their short sight. Wikipedia lists 127 notable writers of spy fiction, dead and living, and only seven of them are women. (Rimington is one of them.) Pick any list of the best spy novels, and it will usually be peopled only by male writers such as John le Carré, John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, Joseph Conrad, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum.