Despite being renowned for their gender equality, the Nordic countries continue to suffer from persistent inequalities including in research and innovation (R&I) as an employment field. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2017 and 2020 with women and men working in R&I inside and outside of the academy, and on Charles Tilly’s (1998) conceptualisations of durable inequalities, the authors find that specific and cumulative gendered disadvantages accompany women’s R&I careers at each of the four researcher career stages (doctoral student, postdoc, researcher/lecturer, full professor), in particular through unquestioned informal everyday practices.