Occasionally, the assessments of a story in the Flash Fiction Online slush pile will become divided along gender lines. Here is an article about serious research of gender differences in the perception of beauty. I don't know that one can or should extrapolate this research on visual beauty to literary quality, but it might be a fun exercise. A snippet from the article:

In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms — x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under.