“The Trouble With Boys,” blares the cover of last week’s Newsweek. There’s a crisis we all need to be worried about, the inside tells us, and the magazine is not alone in sounding the alarm. Boys are falling behind, academically and in terms of general achievement.

The stats are upsetting: Girls are overtaking boys on college campuses, where they now outnumber male students by 56 percent to 44 percent. Boys don’t do as well in school, where their internal wiring makes them less comfortable with sitting still and absorbing knowledge through talk. They mature more slowly. Fewer of them have dads (an astounding 40 percent – no matter what their background – have their natural father at home). More of them are diagnosed with learning disabilities and maladies like ADHD.

It looks bad; but I have two problems with this crisis du jour.

The first is this. There’s a sneaky part of me, when I read such a headline, that says, “Great! Now maybe women will have a chance of catching up in the real world!”

After all, women may outnumber men on college campuses, but once you get out of college, things are not looking a whole lot different. Look at the makeup of the U.S. Senate. Out of the 1,884 people who have served there, 33 – or 1.75 percent – have been women. There are now 14, which makes for precisely 14 percent. Whoopee!

Liddy Dole and Hillary Clinton, capable as they are, are preceded in politics by highly successful husbands, as was Jean Carnahan, who sat in the seat of her late husband. (Mel Carnahan, you may remember, is the guy who performed the amazing feat of defeating from the grave his Republican opponent, none other than John Ashcroft.)

In the House of Representatives, 229 women have served out of a total of more than 9,000. Of those, 36 were elected to fill the terms of dead husbands, and only 15 of the widows were returned by voters. There are now 67 out of 435, or 14.5 percent.

There are precisely eight female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The number is actually falling; in 2004 there were nine. According to a New York research firm, women are in charge of just 14 of the country’s 1,000 top publicly traded companies.

One reason is obvious: Even wealthy, powerful women want families; domestic politics and maternal priorities haven’t changed enough to make motherhood as compatible with careers as fatherhood.

Another reason isn’t so obvious: Apparently women are more willing to risk taking the helm of struggling companies. That old maternal instinct still gets ’em.

Closer to home and much farther down the ladder, my own grown daughter faces exactly the same tensions I faced when she was young: lack of good, affordable child care, and the dearth of flexible jobs that pay a decent wage and bring in any benefits.

No matter what the reasons, I’d say we still have some catching up to do. I wish today’s high-achieving schoolgirls well and hope they can translate their academic success into life success. I’m not counting on it.

But I have another problem with this alleged crisis.

I have a girl who has all the characteristics that supposedly dog the boys.

She’s a kinetic learner – hates sitting still. She learns much better by doing than by listening. She’s happier taking things apart to see how they work than absorbing theory. At 9 she could disassemble our VCR (remember those?) and fix it in a few minutes, but she struggles with getting her homework from her bedroom to her backpack to her locker to her teacher.

Hours of homework are torture to a kid who needs big-muscle activity to feel sane.

Teachers recognized early on that she was smart and took her troubles with classroom concentration and homework performance as a sign of defiance. This is just the sort of misunderstanding, we’re told, that dogs the boys.

Some commentators have latched onto the alleged Boy Crisis as proof that feminism has run amok and that now boys are oppressed by the system.

I think that’s a load of horse humus. I think the system has become a lot less friendly to any kid who doesn’t do well with the ever-more-regimented teaching demanded by increased emphasis on test scores, by overloaded classrooms, by the flight of fathers from families. (Yes, the studies show – if you’re paying attention – that girls need dads just as much as boys do.)

If more girls are prepared, either by nature or nurture, for sitting still and regurgitating knowledge, more power to them – I guess.

But before we declare impending andro-disaster, let’s give this crop of female college students a chance. Check back in a decade and see how many of them break into the halls of legislatures – or Congress.

Then see if my grandchildren can find decent child care.

When we have 65 female senators, I might just be willing to show some concern for the oppressed males of America.

Of course by then, I’ll be well under the ground.