May Hen-Smith

May Hen-Smith is an affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

May is an economic sociologist based in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge and with an interest in decentralized finance (DeFi), tax and the digital economy.

May’s Leverhulme-funded project is a 3-year study which follows the experiences of start-ups and established tech companies as they navigate through the economic systems which generate their value and the regulatory systems which constrain their growth.

May’s second project is a 10-year longitudinal study of women in offshore finance. It chronicles the experiences and career trajectories of women in offshore financial centres and compares those experiences to women in metropolitan financial centres.

May’s third project is funded by the Quebec (Canada) government and is part of an experimental science communication and outreach project devised with Allison Christians (McGill University) called: “Fiscal Literacy NOW: Creating Accessible and Interactive 30-second finance lessons for young people through TikTok and social media”. The intent is to democratize financial literacy through the dissemination of the types of basic finance lessons typically found through higher education.