This article investigates differences between statistics on gender equality in Mexico, the UK and Sweden, and similarities in women professors’ career experiences in these countries. We use Acker’s inequality regime framework, focusing on gender, to explore our data, and argue that similarities in women professors’ lived experiences are related to an image of the ideal academic. This ideal type is produced in the interplay of the university gender regime and other gender regimes, and reproduced through the process of structuration: signification, domination and legitimation. We suggest that the struggle over legitimation can also be a trigger for change.
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