When President Obama recently announced the formation of a White House Council on Women and Girls, he caught heat from both sides – from women who accused him of doing too little for their sex, and from those who accused him of doing too much, insisting that it’s boys and men who need special attention these days, not girls and women.

Guys do seem to be having a tough time of it. Look at the job statistics: A year ago, the unemployment rate for men aged 45 to 55 was below the national average, now it’s 8.7 percent compared to the 8.1 percent for the nation as a whole. For women of the same age, the jobless rate falls to 5.7 percent. Similar discrepancies hold out across the board, for men and women of all ages and all education levels.

College admissions tell a similar story. The census bureau recently reported that 55 percent of undergraduate spots are going to women, plus 60 percent of the places in graduate schools. College, of course, is only for those who make it through high school, and there again the numbers for boys aren’t great. About three-quarters of the girls who enter high school graduate; the number drops to about two-thirds of the boys.

Why not a White House Council on Men and Boys? Because men still run everything, that’s why. The “visuals” of the announcement of the White House Council made the roles of the sexes quite clear – a man, President Obama, stood at the lectern eloquently proclaiming that he would work “to ensure that our daughters and granddaughters have no limits on their dreams, no obstacles to their achievements”; the women, including the president’s accomplished wife, sat in the audience and applauded.

Given the fact that women make up the majority of the electorate and of colleges and professional schools, their numbers in positions of power are remarkably small. Yes, there’s a female speaker of the House, but only 17 percent of the U.S. Congress and just about the same percentage of partners at major law firms are women. Only 13 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and women make up only about one-third of college professors, with the numbers going down as the prestige of the institutions goes up.

In our own business, news, the numbers are about the same. The most recent survey of broadcast news showed 28 percent of major stories reported by women, and at newspapers women make up not quite 40 percent of the writers/reporters and a little more than one-third of the supervisors. That might be the reason that, as tennis champion Billie Jean King once complained in an interview with Cokie, “we get 8 percent of the sports page – horses and dogs get about 7 percent, or about what we do.”