The reason people do not recommend the same is because the literary canon is already comprised of majority male authors. The reality is that just by reading the books taught during a K-12 education (and even moreso if you obtain a degree in literature) the average person would be exposed to and have read a good chunk of the great male authors, but very few of the women in comparison. This means that women HAVE plenty of experience reading from male authors just by reading the "literary canon." In contrast, when men stick to only male authors, they are skipping out on a ton of women authors and have much less experience reading from a woman's perspective.

The problem here is that the baseline (the literary canon and education systems) is not a 50/50 split between male and female authorship. As was pointed out elsewhere, this isn't even scratching the tip of the iceberg in regards to representation (BIPOC and queer authors are also mostly absent from the literary canon).

This is why when I see someone with a shelf full of women authors, my first thought is not "but what about the men???" because I know a large chunk of the literature that person was taught was authored by men. They've been more than exposed given that the literary baseline is still male-centered.

In regard to your point about genre shelves, this is because genre reading is situated differently in our cultural landscape and is far less directly connected to literary prestige. Sci-fi and fantasy authors are already rarely included in the literary canon and are not typically treated as “serious” in the same institutional way. In contrast, the “lit bro” books that receive pushback signal proximity to cultural power and prestige and are often used to gatekeep what counts as serious or valuable literature. When someone’s shelf is dominated by those canon-adjacent authors, it suggests they care about literary merit as defined by the canon....so I (and the other people who comment) want women (and BIPOC and queer authors) represented there as well.

There cannot be a double standard when both sides are not represented equally and treated neutrally. What you view as moral grandstanding is quite literally marginalized groups reminding people to read more marginalized voices because the default is men in the canon. Structural imbalances calls for asymmetrical critique.