To honor the start of Women’s History Month yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg — Katie Couric by his side — announced the creation of new, city-wide mentoring program: NYC BoysREACH.

Yes, BoysREACH. It’s for boys.

It “obviously makes a lot of sense,” a deputy press secretary for the mayor, Evelyn Erskine, said. The city already has a mentoring program for girls called NYC GirlsREACH, pairing high school girls with professional women who show them the ropes and encourage them to go to college.

This is working so well that BoysREACH “was just a natural extension of the program,” Ms. Erskine said. And considering that boys grow up to be men and men have families with women, it actually helps women, too, she explained.

She has a point.

A cockamamie point. Come on. Every time the feminist world comes up with a great idea to empower girls, it seems like guys are waiting in the wings to whine, “We want one, too!” And that’s what they get.

Consider the fate of Take Our Daughters To Work Day. The whole idea was to show girls the exciting world of work and get them psyched to earn 77 cents on the dollar, just like mom.

Well, that worked fine for 10 years. But in 2003, the Ms. Foundation officially changed it to Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, and darned if I can figure out what the point is anymore.

“Through activities designed specifically for the program we can begin a constructive, solution-oriented conversation with our children about the challenges of daily life,” the president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation, Sara Gould, wrote on the Take Our blah blah blahs Web site.

I think she hopes that boys and girls will get together to talk about how to balance work and family life. But I’m pretty sure:

a) They will in fact spend most of the day swiveling around on the desk chairs.

b) The real reason for rejiggering the day was that boys were mad that girls got a day off of school. As usual, the boys won out.

Just as they won out yesterday.

Now, this is not to say that boys don’t deserve some special attention. Perhaps they do. After worrying ourselves sick 10 or 20 years ago that girls were losing all their self-esteem, science smarts, and baby fat in middle school, this country spent a lot of effort figuring out how to get them back on track.

We reminded teachers to call on girls in class and mandated money for girls’ sports teams. We cheered on Astronaut Barbie (diaper sold separately). And all these efforts paid off … if middle school girls were ever really faltering in the first place.

I’m not sure they were. The problem always seemed more anecdotal than documented. But anyway, no sooner were we reviving Ophelia than out came a slew of reports claiming that it’s really the boys who need resuscitation.

After all, more boys than girls have learning disabilities, more boys drop out of high school, and more boys end up in prison. More also end up in the corner office.

Oh, wait. That part went unmentioned.

By the time Newsweek ran a cover story on the problem, it was official: Boys were the new girls, desperately in need of special sensitivity and role models.

That’s what NYC BoysREACH will give them, and of course, this will be a good thing. All children deserve mentoring and encouragement.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to escape the feeling that just when girls were pulling even, or maybe even ahead, males felt like the world had turned topsy-turvy: If girls were doing better than boys, something must be terribly wrong!

And so they set about bringing boys at least up to par. They even made strides the first day of Women’s History Month.

Men in power, working to keep it that way. Come to think of it, that does sum up most of women’s history.