WHEN I was a little girl I wanted nothing more than to be a little boy. In particular, I wanted to be my tree-climbing, football-playing big brother. He seemed to have a blissful life of scraps, muddy knees and midnight snacks. To keep up with the boys I developed a detailed knowledge of 1970s football teams and picked my nose with the best of them. But though I tagged along, I was always called in early to do my homework.

Obviously I wasn't the only girl studying while the boys played football. In one of the most extraordinary social changes of the past 50 years, boys' educational achievements have been steadily falling since the 1970s while girls have soared ahead.

Across Scotland, 30% of boys achieved five or more Standard Grades at levels one or two in 2006, compared with 39% of girls. Alongside the academic slide go more serious problems. Boys make up 70% of those with special educational needs, 72% of dyslexics and 88% of those with behavioural, emotional and social needs.

Education secretary Alan Johnson last week addressed a meeting held to tackle the problem of underachieving boys in British education. In his speech to the Fabian Society he called for every secondary school library to have a "boys' bookshelf" filled with the works of contemporary authors, such as Melvyn Burgess and Anthony Horowitz, who provide "positive, modern, relevant role models" for boys reluctant to read and worried about being bullied and labelled a swot. Action-packed fiction featuring tough, powerful and resourceful male characters would, he argued, inspire a generation of boys being left behind by their female classmates.

It's a fine idea, but the problem with boys goes deeper than the minister is willing to admit. To find out why, we could do worse than look inside a book that boys are reading. The surprise bestseller of Christmas 2006 was The Dangerous Book For Boys by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden. It's an old- fashioned jumble of facts, tricks, lists and wheezes that seems to have delighted dads as much as sons.

But The Dangerous Book For Boys is dressed up in a retro dustjacket made to look as though it came from an Edwardian library. That's probably the last time that masculine values such as energy, aggression and determination were valued above all others.

Since then the world has changed beyond all recognition. The heavy industries have gone, replaced by a service sector in which soft, traditionally feminine, interpersonal skills such as empathy, politeness and getting along with your co-workers are more important than male camaraderie.

Crucially for education, teaching, particularly in primary schools, is an increasingly female profession.

It's not hard to see why teachers might favour well-behaved, industrious girls to inattentive boys who seem hard-wired to fidget, fight and test the rules.

IN the US, where the debate on the educational challenges facing boys is decades ahead of here, the argument has taken a political tone. Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, argued in a recent report that misguided feminism is responsible for the declining educational achievements of boys. In the 1990s, she said, girls were making progress toward educational equality, but feminist educators portrayed them as disadvantaged and gave them additional support and attention. Boys, whose rates of achievement had begun to stall, were ignored.

The knock-on effects are clear to see. In the UK, women are now making the running in previously male-dominated professions. In 2005, 63% of accountancy apprenticeships were taken by women. Females account for 62% of law students and 58% of medicine and dentistry graduates. Last year, more than half of first-degree graduates were women.

In 2006, 7% of male graduates languished on the dole queue, twice the number of women. In comparison, women have never had it so good. Last weekend a survey of attitudes among women in their 20s published in the Observer reported that a new super-breed of educated, ambitious and successful females dubbed "Generation Y women" are outmatching their male counterparts at school, university and work. They are too busy revelling in their heady ascent to experience any of the self-doubt or worry about the lack of opportunities that troubled their predecessors even a decade ago.

Educationally backward, a liability in the workplace and besieged by news stories telling them that they are no longer even biologically essential for reproduction: no wonder men look back with nostalgia to the days when boys were for conquering, exploring and fighting and girls kept the home fires burning.

Yet this change in status isn't a joke: it has deadly consequences.

Men in the UK are three times more likely than women to commit suicide. The pendulum, which for centuries benefited boys, has swung too far in the other direction, leaving a generation of boys feeling isolated, confused and riddled with insecurities. Energy, aggression and the testing of limits still play an important role in society. As a woman, I would far rather deal with the frank, open competition of a man than the bitchy, underhand competition of a woman.

Young boys desperately need to feel that being a man is a blessing not an embarrassment. And that means strong role models drawn from in or outside the family, male primary school teachers and meaningful engagement with their peers.

Little boys are made from slugs, snails and puppydog tails. Little girls are clearly made of stronger stuff. Isn't it time we gave the weaker sex a break?