This paper examines how early-career women scientists navigate and contest men-dominated academic cultures within STEM departments at Danish universities. While gendered stereotypes and inequalities shape academic work more broadly, research consistently shows that the gender gap in STEM widens at each level of the academic hierarchy, resulting in underrepresentation of women in senior positions (Mathura, 2024). Recent scholarship has shifted attention toward systemic conditions, highlighting how organizational structures, gender bias in hiring and promotion, unequal access to networks and mentoring, everyday sexism and intersectional inequalities collectively constrain women’s academic careers in STEM (Bendl & Schmidt, 2010; Blackwell et al., 2009; Khawaja, 2025; Salmon, 2022). Focusing on early-career women scientists in STEM, the paper examines what I conceptualize as everyday diversity work: the small, often informal practices through which women resist masculinized scientific norms, everyday sexism, and gender bias (Vertelyte, 2025). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on atmospheric work (2014), I approach diversity work as a form of mood work (Staunæs & Vertelyte, 2024) that intervenes in the affective life of organizations. In particular, the analysis foregrounds the role of noise making. Conceptualized as affective disturbance (Thompson, 2017), the paper analyses how noise associated with women doing diversity work interrupt dominant masculinized narratives, even as they are frequently dismissed as emotional, unprofessional or ‘too loud’. As an affective condition historically associated with women, unruliness, and disorder, noise draws attention to gendered inequalities by interrupting everyday academic practices that are otherwise treated as neutral, rational, or simply “how things are done.” Through such noisy interventions, early-career women do not simply react to exclusionary environments - they actively reconfigure organizational atmospheres, exposing the affective and gendered foundations of academic life in STEM. Drawing on 13 in-depth qualitative interviews with early-career women scientists conducted between 2022 and 2023, the analysis situates these experiences within a specifically Danish context, where gender is often framed as irrelevant due to a pervasive self-image of Denmark as a gender-equal society. Drawing on critiques of postfeminist gender regimes (Skewes, 2023; Utoft, 2021), the paper shows how this framing paradoxically coexists with the growing hyper-visibility of diversity action plans most of which remain narrowly focused on women’s representation, while paying little attention to improving women’s everyday working conditions in the here and now.

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