James Patterson has been the top earning author for quite a while. Shades and Hunger Games etc are effectively blips to his streak as I understand it. Most of his income is from books while theirs is from movies. He, John Grisham, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King (who seems to be on the downhill, health maybe?) are more successful than Dan Brown. My mother has been reading all of their books for as long as I can remember, and I'm in my thirties. Danielle Steele is the only woman author she reads as much as best I can recall.

Besides, E.L. James is a masculine pen name, and look, Rowling decided it was going to be better to publish under a very male pseudonym after being successful with the pseudo-real masculine name "J.K. Rowling". Sure she got pigeonholed, but she also didn't choose a female pen name for good reason. J.K. Rowling didn't used to have a middle name. She adopted the second letter because her agent wanted her to sound more masculine so boys would read her boy-focused kids series because boys don't like reading women's writing. But sure, we can consider the earnings as "for women" rather than "for male pseudonyms" if you really want to ignore that bias. You shouldn't, it's basically supporting the assertion that you'll do fine as a man. You want to believe.

Being male doesn't automatically make one's work high-brow, no. Hence my last line in the previous comment. On the other hand, selling unhealthy relationships seems to be a recipe for a one-hit wonder series that's not actually sustainable for individual authors. Except for the mills and boon type authors. I think most of those authors are moving to self-publishing on kindle now to get more than 2k a book.