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The purpose of this study was to develop a scale that can be used to assess inequality at work based on gender, age and ethnicity that is grounded in Acker’s (2006) inequality regimes.

The authors used three representative samples (total N = 1,806) of Swedish teachers, nurses and social workers to develop and validate the scale. The validation process included the assessment of content validity, confirmatory factor analysis for factorial validity, internal consistency and associations with theoretically warranted outcomes and related constructs to assess criterion-related validity and convergent validity.

The authors found evidence supporting the content, factorial, criterion-related and convergent validity of the InEquality in organisations Scale (InE-S). Furthermore, the scale demonstrated high internal consistency.

The newly developed scale InE-S may be used to further the understanding of how inequality at work influences employees. This study makes a contribution to the current literature by providing a scale that, for the first time, can test Acker’s hypotheses using quantitative methods to demonstrate the consequences of inequality at work.

This paper utilizes the concept of innovation as a form of methodological starting-point in order to analyse the gendered meanings of marketization in Swedish universities. The purpose of the paper is to scrutinize how the concept of innovation is produced in Swedish universities, and how these versions of innovation are gendered and related to different understandings of gender equality.

The analysis departs from a critical perspective to studies of gender equality and is anchored in a critical policy analysis approach – the “what's the problem represented to be? Approach” developed by Bacchi. This approach is used in the analysis of interviews with top-level leaders at two Swedish universities and how they perceive innovation. The results are related to a governmentality framework in order to explain the gendered innovation discourse in academia.

One of the main results is that innovation is represented in a broad way when discussed at a more abstract level. However, when the discussion becomes more concrete and also related to a gendered understanding of the researchers actually turning their research results into innovations, this broad representation of innovation shrinks. The analysis also shows how a governmentality framework both explains the inevitability of innovation and the difficulties of working for political change for women in the academy.

In analysing innovation as produced instead of taken for granted, this article puts forward a critical understanding of innovation, both in relation to gender and to the inevitability of de-politicisation processes of the neo-liberal audit culture in academia.