It's one of the many peculiarities of XML: the "less-than" bracket is not allowed in text (because it could indicate the opening of a new XML tag), but the "greater-than" bracket does not need encoding when it's in text, because it's not ambiguous.
Just check what the W3C says about writing a raw >:
> For characters such as > where XML defines a built-in entity but does not require its use in all circumstances, it is implementation-dependent whether the character is escaped.
