National audience This communication proposes an entry by an area rarely addressed in the sociology of culture: scientific and technical culture. Exhibited in museums dedicated to it and distributed via specialised media (magazines, books, games, vulgarisation programmes) or generalist — through the real or fictitious performances of scientists — scientific culture is gradually gaining its place alongside ‘classical’ culture in research programmes (Bordeaux and Kerlan, 2015; Detrez, 2014).The approach is all the more interesting given that inequalities and power issues are important in this area: not everyone is given the opportunity to become a scientist, and the practice of science, with the exception of medicine and the like, remains the prerogative of white men in the favoured classes (Harding, 1991). Familiarity with science is thus one of the attributes of the model of hegemonic masculinity and is part of a position of cultural authority (Connell, 2014 [1995]).Many speeches — for example in cultural mediation — lend to scientific culture the virtues of academic democratisation and ‘openness of opportunities’, based on the idea that science would allow individuals to be selected in a just and meritocratic way and to raise them socially: science would be a social lift. This Communication seeks first to show how a widely shared doxa of the high exchange value and social power of science is expressed in scientific cultural products, and how the power of a social lift available to science is embodied in concrete cultural mediation in schools. The challenge of this work is also to counter this doxa by showing that scientific culture is also the seat of a power that is legitimate and reinforces social inequalities in terms of gender, class and “race”, while preserving the appearance of a fair selection based on meritocracy and intelligence.This work is based on a longitudinal field survey conducted since 2013 among children living in the 8th district of Lyon. The study follows a cohort of students who have been participating for three years in a project entitled “Everything Equal in Science” (TES), led by the Association of Scientific Extension Sciences, and which results in a cohort of students who have taken part in the 1th class of scientific workshops. The communication will build on the data obtained from three years of participating observation of the scientific workshops as well as interviews conducted in 2015 and 2016 with children, their families, scientific mediators and teachers. The interviews focus on their cultural practices, the place of science and their representations of science and scientists. References Archer L., Dawson E., Seakins A., Dewitt J., Godec S., Whitby C., 2016, ‘I’m Being a Man Here’: Urban Boys’ Performance of Masculinity and Engagement With Science During a Science Museum Visit, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 25, 3, pp. 438-485.Archer L. Dewitt J., Osborne J., Dillon J., Willis B., Wong B., 2012, ‘Balancing acts’: Elementary school girls’ negotiations of femininity, achievement, and science’, Science Education, 96, 6, pp. 967-989. Bordeaux, M.-C., Kerlan, A. (Ders.), 2015, Report on the assessment of the ‘effects’ of artistic and cultural education. Methodological and epistemological study, Grenoble, Stendhal.Connell R. University, 2014, male: Social challenges of hegemony, translated by Hagège M., Vuattoux A., Paris, Éditions Amsterdam dam.Détrez C., 2014, Sociology of Culture, Paris, Armand Colin.Harding S., 1991, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: THINKING from Women’s Lives, Ithaca, N.Y, Cornell University Press.Perry B.L., Link T., Boelter C., Leukefeld C., 2012, ‘Blinded to science: gender differences in the effects of race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status on academic and scientific attitudes among sixth graders’, Gender and Education, 24, 7, pp. 725-743.