The importance of both parents’ occupation on the social destiny of women and men have often been documented. However, studies have not explained how the mother’s influence differs from that of the father and in particular when both parents have different and unequal social positions. We argue that these differences shed light on distinct factors that underlie social class reproduction: the position of the social class in the economic hierarchy and gender role imitation. To evaluate the relative importance of each of those factors, we compare the father’s and mother’s influence and we examine more particularly families in which the mother has a higher position than the father. We use data from the French Labor Force Survey and a six classes version of the European Socioeconomic Classification. Results show that the position in the economic hierarchy plays the first role to explain social reproduction. Gender role imitation plays a secondary role that can offset the role of economic hierarchy in some particular family configurations. The strength of inheritance of a class from a parent to a child depends therefore on an interplay between the position of the class in the economic hierarchy, the parent gender, and the child gender.

父母双方的职业对男女社会命运的重要性经常被记录下来。然而，研究并未解释母亲的影响与父亲的影响有何不同，尤其是当父母双方的社会地位不同且不平等时。我们认为，这些差异揭示了构成社会阶层再生产基础的不同因素：社会阶层在经济等级制度中的地位和性别角色模仿。为了评估每个因素的相对重要性，我们比较了父亲和母亲的影响，我们更具体地考察了母亲地位高于父亲的家庭。我们使用来自法国劳动力调查的数据和欧洲社会经济分类的六级版本。结果表明，在经济等级中的地位对解释社会再生产起着首要作用。性别角色模仿起着次要作用，可以抵消某些特定家庭结构中经济等级的作用。因此，一个阶级从父母到子女的继承强度取决于该阶级在经济等级制度中的地位、父母性别和子女性别之间的相互作用。