Sara Genn, a painter, in her late father’s studio in South Surrey, British Columbia. “We would have really been rebelling if we decided to become accountants or doctors,” she said of being raised by an artist. Robert Leon for The New York Times

When children choose what to be when they grow up, they often follow in their fathers’ footsteps. But mothers are powerful, too.

Working sons of working fathers are, on average, 2.7 times as likely as the rest of the population to have the same job but only two times as likely to have the same job as their working mothers, according to an analysis by The New York Times, one of the first to look at mothers and daughters in addition to fathers and sons. Daughters are 1.8 times as likely to have the same job as their mothers and 1.7 times as likely to have the same job as their fathers.

The estimates, drawn from General Social Survey data between 1994 and 2016, show that mothers, despite working in lower numbers, are still influential in inspiring their children’s career choices. And the passing down of occupation and other measures of socioeconomic status seems to affect boys more than girls.

Some of the jobs most likely to be passed down include steelworker, legislator, baker, lawyer and doctor. Children are less likely to follow their parents’ careers if they are middle managers or clerical or service workers. These findings broadly align with previous research.

“It’s not just a matter of education or what your parents can buy — there’s something about the occupations themselves,” said Kim Weeden, chairwoman of the sociology department at Cornell University, who is researching the topic with April Sutton, also a sociologist.

It’s another example of the powerful role family circumstances play in shaping children’s lives. Children with unemployed parents were more likely to say they didn’t know what they wanted to do for work, they found. “There’s an inheritance of advantage but also disadvantage when you talk about occupational plans,” Ms. Weeden said.

A big factor in passing down occupations — and advantage or disadvantage — is the connections parents offer children. Children who pursue the same job as their parents often start ahead, whether through inheriting a family business, getting an internship at a parent’s company or having a parent put in a good word with a colleague.

“If people lack financial capital, they likely lack these other types of capital as well,” said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard. “For all of these reasons, the world is not a very fair place for some kids.”

Some fields are particularly dynastic, like Hollywood acting or politics.

Laura Grant was an elementary schoolteacher when her father, Bill Grant, a longtime member of the House of Representatives in Washington State, died, and Ms. Grant took his seat.

“The leadership team and the speaker were dear family friends,” said Ms. Grant, who lives in Walla Walla and is teaching again after losing the election for the term after her appointment. “Instantly I was part of that inside circle.”

Children often pursue their parents’ jobs because of the breakfast-table effect: Family conversations influence them. They fuel interests or teach children what less commonly understood careers entail (probably one reason textile spinning and shoemaking are high on the list of jobs disproportionately passed on to children). In interviews, people who followed their parents’ career paths described it as speaking the same language.

Certain aptitudes may be inherited. Families also have their own cultures, reflected in how they value spending time — whether making things by hand, achieving academically or filling the home with art and music. People described flirtations with other careers as teenage rebellions before settling into a parent’s occupation.

How Frequently Do Daughters Share an Occupation With Their Parents?

Sara Genn, a painter and singer, is the daughter of Robert Genn, a Canadian landscape painter. “He had a studio next to our house, so it was something that we always grew up with,” she said. “His philosophy was just make it part of everyday life and make materials readily available.”

Ms. Genn stands in front of a portrait of her father, Robert Genn, also a painter. Daughters of artist fathers are eight times as likely to become artists themselves. Robert Leon for The New York Times

Her two brothers also work in the arts. “We would have really been rebelling if we decided to become accountants or doctors,” she said.

Many people said they were inspired by their parents’ love of their jobs.

Elizabeth Auld, 29, is an emergency medicine resident in New York, and her father is an orthopedic surgeon in Seattle. She remembers the cookies that patients baked for him at the holidays, and the care he gave neighborhood friends when they were injured.

“I was looking for a way to do meaningful work, and seeing how much satisfaction he derived from the job made me see it was a profession I should be considering,” Ms. Auld said. (Her two sisters, like their mother, went to film school.)

Though research has focused more on fathers, mothers have always influenced their children’s career paths, social scientists say. “What we’re learning is that both parents are quite important, and quite important for both boys and girls,” Ms. Weeden said.

In our analysis, sons are 20 times as likely to be a scientist if their mother is one. Gil Rabinovici is the son of Sarah Bacus, a cancer scientist, and Eliezer Rabinovici, a theoretical physicist. After giving up the idea of becoming the next Steven Spielberg or playing third base for the Chicago Cubs, he became a neurologist, studying memory disorders at the University of California, San Francisco.

How Frequently Do Sons Share an Occupation With Their Parents?

“I think seeing work for them growing up as a passion rather than a chore is something I’m sure had an influence on me,” he said.

The effect of his mother’s science career has been intergenerational, he said: His 9-year-old daughter spends time drawing neurons and brain schematics. “It definitely influenced how I view gender, and probably having a strong role model as a scientist influenced her,” he said.

Even mothers not in the labor force sometimes pass on their passions and encourage children to take the path they could not, Ms. Goldin said. Cathleen Morawetz, a mathematician who died in August at 94, credited her career to her mother, a math major who dropped out upon marrying but encouraged her daughter’s interest in mathematics.

Yet over all, parents have less of an effect on daughters than on sons, in career and socioeconomic status more broadly, according to research.

One explanation is that previous generations of mothers had fewer job options than their daughters, so their daughters consider a broader range of jobs. Men, meanwhile, are unlikely to take jobs that haven’t typically been done by men.

Because daughters are less likely to work or earn as much, parents might invest more in sons’ careers. But more likely, researchers said, parents invest equally, and women make more career compromises because of family obligations. Especially with young children, some women “can’t do the jobs that they wanted or were trained to do by their parents,” said Melinda Morrill, an economist at North Carolina State University.

The General Social Survey analysis is not conclusive. For instance, because of the small sample size, we could not control for age, which matters when considering how women’s careers are affected by motherhood. The survey may also misclassify the dominant career of the parent. Survey respondents were asked only what their parents’ latest occupation was, so if the parent was a steelworker in the prime of his career, but now is a greeter at Walmart, the survey would classify him as a greeter. The same is true if the parent is now retired.