I think that there are definite differences between women's and men's writing. That is not to say that there aren't men who can write 'like women' and women who can write 'like men', or indeed writers who can manage to write without their gender being apparent.
My husband tends to read more male writers and I tend to read more female writers. If you did a scientific sampling of the books we read, you'd probably find that he reads 70-80% men and I read 60-70% women. However, neither of us has sat down and said 'I will only read books written by people of my own gender.' and we're both open to anything.
[I'm talking in generalisations here, and know that there are definite exceptions.] I think the reason I seem to prepare women writers (in whatever gender) is that they seem to be able to build the characters a lot better (at least in the sense of what I'm looking for in a character, perhaps). And I think that a lot of the time that does involve getting the 'dull' (or more correctly the every-day) stuff right. Women seem to be more able to portray the small-picture elements whereas men are better with the big-picture things. That doesn't mean that all women write about is housework and running a home and all men write about are wars and politics. There's just a different angle, perhaps.
My husband and I both love the Empire series by Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurtz and we have both read the whole series probably at least five times, if not more. What's interesting is that when we reread we both skip over different bits. I tend to skip over the battle scenes, while he tends to skip over the romantic bits and the intracies of estate management.
I had assumed when I first read about those comments about women's submissions to this book, that both the authors in quesiton were men. But Ali Smith (who I'm afraid I'd never heard of before - oops) is a woman. And they have got plenty of women's writing in the final book, it seems. I think what got to me was the implication that the domestic was not a valid thing to write about. The domestic can, as many people have said, bring huge amounts of drama, emotion, pathos, etc. One book that springs to mind is Brick Lane by Monica Ali, which is very domestic really, but a fantastic book (IMO). None of saw the submissions that Litt and Smith were talking about, so they might well have been a bunch of crud.
