Using Acker's conceptual framework of inequality regimes, this article explores the experiences of Bangladeshi, Caribbean and Pakistani women working in three parts of the public sector: health, local government and higher education. Our concern is to investigate how inequality regimes are sustained, despite the existence in the public sector of more sophisticated policy development and stronger legal duties than in the private sector. Drawing on interviews with managers and with women employees, the study demonstrates the complexity and unevenness in the way inequality regimes are produced, reproduced and rationalized. Utilising what Crenshaw calls an ‘intersectional sensibility’ helps reveal the persistence of intersectional inequalities in organizations explicitly committed to challenging inequality regimes.