Megan Tobias Neely

Megan Tobias Neely is a sociologist who studies workplace and economic inequality through the lens of gender, race, and social class. Her first book, Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (2020) with Ken-Hou Lin, demonstrates how the growth of the U.S. financial sector increased inequality by redistributing resources from workers and families into the hands of owners, executives, and financial professionals. Her recent work investigates how gender, race, and social class influence access to earnings and capital in some of the wealthiest industries in the United States. On this topic, she is writing a book with the University of California Press, entitled Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street, that presents an insider’s look at the inner workings of the notoriously rich and secretive hedge fund industry. She investigates how the industry garners extreme wealth and why a select group of predominantly white men benefit. Building on this research, she is currently conducting interviews on inequality in access to capital at venture capital and technology startup firms.

From 2017-2020, Neely was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s WMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab and Clayman Institute for Gender Research. In 2017, she graduated with a PhD in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.