I'm a librarian who loves anime, manga, and reading a wide variety of genres.
I've started this list at Jessica's suggestion. If I've missed an author, let me know - and if you could suggest a particular book, that would be even better, because picking specific books is turning out to be the hardest part of making the list.
I'm trying to stick to one book per author, but that's been difficult in a few cases. So many of these women write/wrote multiple unrelated series, and it's not always easy for me to tell what their most popular book/series is. So far, I have more than one book listed for Tanith Lee and C.J. Cherryh and may go back and list additional books for some of the others.
On a related note, did you know that LibraryThing has a "Rating Statistics" feature on its author pages? It's been coming in very handy.