Do gender and class inequalities reinforce or compensate for one another ?
Many types of educational programs were developed during the period under study. This expansion brought with it a certain democratization, in that highest degree obtained became less dependent on social origin. Still, the social hierarchy for access to the different educational levels remained relatively stable–though the whole was displaced upward as more and more children stayed in school longer. This means that while social inequalities in access to first year of collège disappeared, those characterizing access to first year of lycée remained high, as did those for obtention of the baccalauréat, including in the youngest cohorts (Merle, 2000; Duru-Bellat and Kieffer, 2000). In generations born between 1964 and 1973,26% of manual workers’ children who had entered first year of collège obtained the baccalauréat compared to 78% of cadres’children–an odds ratio of 10.
