Leslie McCall

Associate Director, Stone Center
Presidential Professor of Sociology and Political Science
CUNY Graduate Center

Leslie McCall studies public opinion about inequality, opportunity, and related economic and policy issues; trends in actual earnings and family income inequality; and patterns of intersectional inequality. She is the author of The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (2013) and Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy (2001). Her research has also been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes and supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and the Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative. She was formerly at Northwestern University, where she was a professor of sociology and political science (courtesy), as well as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.

While most of McCall’s published research to date focuses on inequality within the United States using existing survey data, her recently published and ongoing research branches out to incorporate other countries and new methodological approaches, including: studies of rising economic inequality among families and declining gender inequality using new demographic measures; media coverage of economic inequality since the 1980s using new machine learning tools; and public views about inequality, opportunity, and redistribution using survey experimental methods and new questions fielded on major international surveys. McCall also maintains an interest in the conceptualization and empirical analysis of intersectionality from a social science perspective.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Work

Course Offerings

Areas of Expertise

Public Opinion (Inequality, Opportunity, and Related Economic Policy Issues)

Earnings and Family Income Inequality

Patterns of Intersectional Inequality

Featured Work


Selected Work

Leslie McCall on Inequality and Public Opinion

April 11, 2019|

In this lecture, Leslie McCall presents a framework for understanding how, in the United States, public opinions about inequality, economic opportunity, and redistribution are related to one another in ways that are at odds with key tenets of American exceptionalism.