Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly becoming ‘magnets’ for a skilled migrant workforce. While ‘internationalisation’ is often understood as something to be celebrated and (further) accomplished, some observers speak of clear signs of discriminatory experiences among racialised and migrant academics. This is a new aspect, as social inequalities have by and large been considered in migration studies to be the sole terrain of labour mobility into less-skilled sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, abundant literature on gender and higher education shows that women academics have poorer access to career progression than men, demonstrating gender-based academic career inequalities. However, the insights generated in these two strands of scholarship have seldom been in conversation with one another. In addition, much attention has been paid to the experience of individual academics and students, leaving the role of HEIs in the ‘making’ of a transnational academic career aside as a result. This paper takes stock of the lack of an intersectional perspective, focusing on the role of HEIs as transnational knowledge brokers. Drawing on case-study HEIs, it explores some of the ways in which HEIs produce transnational academic fields and function as brokers of knowledge workers across borders.  In particular, the paper aims to examine what kind of meaning is given to ‘race’ and gender—the categories which evoke social inequalities—, and how a predominantly negative meaning associated with these categories might be altered in the transnational brokerage process.