It is a well-known story that female scientists have struggled to ‘break into the lab’ and  secure academic positions. A relatively new story is the organizational and political efforts to fix the ‘leaking pipe’ through various action plans and diversity initiatives. Danish Universities across STEM fields have recently developed diversity action plans and activities to address the gender gap in STEM. However, diversity work encompasses both the formal efforts carried out by organizations (e.g., diversity committees, plans, workshops) and the everyday interactions that each of us engages in when encountering and relating to human diversity. In this presentation, we draw from our interview material with three distinct groups of early career female scholars: international scholars, scholars with racialized minority backgrounds, and scholars with North-Atlantic backgrounds. We identify and conceptualize different ways of affectively interrupting, disrupting, and creating epistemic frictions in STEM.