Still with the unfinished business.

How easy/difficult is it to detect if a certain piece of literature is written by a man or woman, assuming that it's on a general, non-gender topic, and the identity of the writer is unknown?

There must be some research on this, and some sociologist must surely have written up a thesis on this (maybe the WP has some knowledge). But since one is too lazy to search for this, nor does one have access to all the world's libraries, we shall resort to old-fashioned theorising (which is always fun to do, and an excuse not to do the mundane, real-life deeds that demand doing).

Is it possible, if the writer is careful about not making such references, that readers could still identify the writer's gender? Will a bias always creep in, regardless of how careful the writer is? And when you read a piece without knowing who has written it - say a film/book review - can you confidently determine whether it was written by a man or a woman?

Thinking of which, when you (that means you, dear reader) do read an unnamed article, do you automatically make a judgment about the author's gender? Do you tend to go over the article, looking for minute clues, make a decision, then re-read the article, and place what it was written in the context of the gender you have decided in favour of? One has realised one tends to do this on occasion, and the decision-making causes a bias which the first reading did not evoke. Doesn't that say a lot about our social conditioning.

Do tell.

PS. Now one could make this interesting by asking one's readers to make a guess about one's own identity, since obviously people are going to say "A-ha, we see you've been experimenting with this tactic yourself huh?" (and if people don't say that, then obviously one is more subtle than one expected (but not anymore obviously, because one has Brought It To Your Attention (unless, you ignore it like the SEP that ol' Douglas spoke about (hey Flaffy, three brackets inside each other, and this makes it four - how cool is that huh?)))), but one won't, because is not yet ready to Reveal All, or indeed, Reveal Anything. One is being petty and childish - indulgence is asked for.