For a traditional British conservative take on men's issues, you can't get much more pure than the editor of the Spectator writing in the Telegraph in defence of his chum Boris Johnson. The London mayor made a crass, sexist joke this week about Malaysian girls going off to university to find husbands. Fraser Nelson's article is a familiar rehashing of the End of Men narrative, nicely nailed by my Comment is free colleague Sarah Ditum on Twitter: "It's like he read Hanna Rosin but none of the reviews."

His analysis falls short on several fronts. The first is a simple matter of reality. Nelson discusses the gender trends in education, employment and relationships for young people up to the age of 30, while completely ignoring that the picture changes profoundly when people have children. Second, while noting that boys at the top are still doing just fine, Nelson never acknowledges that the problems are fundamentally economic and class-based. Above all, for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, neither Nelson nor Johnson can offer a single prescription to heal the malaise.

The fundamental problem Nelson identifies is that our society no longer has a pressing need for the attributes of traditional working-class masculinity: brute strength, endurance and courage in the workplace; a provider's role at home. There are two possible solutions to that. The first would be an economic project to revitalise British manufacturing industry, especially heavy industry, which has shrunk by two-thirds over the past 30 years. The second would be a social project to reinvent masculinity and gender roles in keeping with the world we have built.

Both of these options are anathema to most conservatives. The right sacrificed the prospects of young working-class men when they abandoned a controlled economy to the whims of the global free market. The coalition government's only notable reactions to the underachievement and alienation of young men has been to rail against deadbeat dads and to offer a pathetic cash bribe to couples as a reward for marriage.

There are signs that the mainstream left is beginning to awaken to the issues. Labour MP David Lammy offered an insightful outline of some of the issues on Father's Day, calling on Ed Miliband and leftwing thinktanks to develop policies to make us "the most family-friendly nation in the world" without really spelling out how that could be achieved. Diane Abbott recently spoke about the crisis of masculinity, in a wide-ranging and constructive speech, but inevitably the headlines were grabbed by a paragraph or two portraying (some) young men as savage bundles of machismo, misogyny and homophobia fuelled by pornography, Viagra and Jack Daniel's.

For all the furrowed brows, there is little sign of tangible change. The spectacularly unequal outcomes for girls and boys in education are now beyond dispute. Schoolgirls are outperforming their male peers even in science and maths. But when the TES and the Guardian covered this news, it was only with concern that it was not being translated into university admissions and postgraduate achievement. I fully support efforts to get talented women into science, engineering and technology, but where are the similar efforts to inspire boys into medicine, teaching, nursing, pharmacology or any of the other fields where they are falling ever further behind? Our culture, both by omission and commission, seems resigned to male underachievement while simultaneously berating young men for their failings.

My elder son finishes primary school next week, and nervously prepares himself to enter the furnace of secondary education. Like all 11-year-olds, he has spent much of the last year being prodded and tested with Sats and other blunt tools like a white mouse in a lab. After one such experiment, he told me proudly of his success. "I scored highest of all the boys," he proclaimed. After due expressions of support, I couldn't resist asking about his other classmates. "Oh yes, lots of the girls scored more than me, but they always do. Girls are just cleverer than boys."

It is possible that he has learned this lesson from observing his own mum and dad, which would be an entirely legitimate reading of the evidence, but I suspect there is something more to it than that. Before even leaving primary school he has absorbed a corrosive and pervasive myth about what should be expected from boys and girls. It's my responsibility to correct him on that. It is our collective responsibility to work out where the myth has come from and what we can do to put it right.