Dr Maria do Mar Pereira was a keynote speaker at the international conference Doing Science – Doing Excellence – Doing Inequalities, at Ruhr University – Bochum, in Germany. The conference brought together researchers, equality practitioners, and scientific policy-makers from across Europe to discuss the relationship between scientific excellence and gender equality, and particularly the ways in which contemporary definitions of scientific excellence normalise and reproduce problematic gender inequalities. Maria do Mar’s very well received keynote address was based on her new book Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: an Ethnography of Academia (Routledge, 2017) and discussed the association of scientific excellence with intense productivity in contemporary universities. Maria do Mar argued that this association can paradoxically undermine the excellence of the knowledge we produce, because it is harder (and sometimes impossible) to create excellent knowledge in academic cultures of intense and individualised labour, in which many academics struggle to find the time necessary not just to write their research, but also to read, peer review and engage with other colleagues’ work.