Megan Neely

Megan Tobias Neely studies economic inequality through the lens of gender, race, and social class. Her current research investigates how social inequality influences access to power and capital in some of the wealthiest industries in the United States, including the hedge fund, venture capital, technology startup, and artificial intelligence spaces.

Her recent book, Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (2022, University of California Press), presents an insider’s look at the notoriously rich, powerful, and secretive U.S. hedge fund industry. Hedged Out won the 2023 Alice Amsden Book Award of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association’s 2024 Viviana Zelizer Best Book Award and the 2024 Max Weber Book Award. Her first book, with Ken-Hou Lin, Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (2020, Oxford University Press) demonstrates why widening inequality in the United States is inextricably tied to the rise of big finance. Her research has also been published in the Annual Review of Sociology, Socio-Economic Review, American Behavioral Scientist, Qualitative Sociology, Sociology Compass, and Social Currents.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Reuters, The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, Politico, Jacobin, The New Republic, AJ+, Current Affairs podcast, New Books Network, American Sociological Association's Work in Progress, Clayman Institute for Gender Research's Gender News, Economic Sociology and Political Economy, and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice's Human Rights Working Paper Series.

Her academic research is highly relevant to those in government, policy, and industry. She has been invited to present her work at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development’s Overcoming Inequalities summit, Tax Justice Network conference, and TechCrunch Disrupt meeting as well as for a number of corporate audiences.

In 2017, she graduated with a PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. From 2017-2020, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research and VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab, where she is currently a faculty affiliate contributing to its foundational research to advance women’s leadership by diagnosing barriers, developing interventions, and evaluating outcomes to improve representation in power-holding positions in the workplace.

For more on her work: 

“How Hedge Funds’ Lack of Diversity Affects All of Us” in Time Magazine 

“High Finance” on the BBC’s Thinking Allowed 

Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street in Publishers Weekly