Cryptocurrency Startup Underpaid Women and Black Employees, Data Shows

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/coinbase-pay-employees.html

by martey • 6 years ago

39 18 6 years ago

For context, this is a second hit piece by NYT on Coinbase. The first one was almost exactly a month ago [0]. They started after Coinbase specifically took a stance to separate political activism from work [1] and offered the employees who were not happy with it to take a severance package.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/coinbase-crypt...

[1] https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...

torhorway• 6 years ago

Doesn't seem much like a hit piece. Coinbase is widely known to pay terrible comp packages by exploiting peoples "passion" for cryptocurrency.

alphabettsy3• 6 years ago

Can you accurately call something that’s well sourced and provides evidence a hit piece?

mrslave• 6 years ago

But can you say that newspapers don't have agendas?

john_moscow2• 6 years ago

Well, the well-sourced and evidence-based social justice pieces usually conveniently leave out 2 interesting points:

1. The differences between ethnic groups starts early in childhood. It's about the role models kids have. It's about how much time their parents spend with them and how much they nag on them to study. It is totally fixable if we generally focus on promoting independent thinking, long-term planning and delayed gratification. Everyone can do this, it's hard but absolutely possible. But instead, our society is trying to erase these values by penalizing those who were raised with them.

2. Like it or not, there are behavioral differences between men and women. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there are differences, especially when it comes to risk-taking and multitasking. A trivial example would be traffic accidents where denting the bumper on a parking lot would be a "typically female" thing, and totalling the car while doing 40mph over the speed limit would be a "typically male" thing. Again, nobody is trying to pinpoint specific risk-taking strategies that statistically give you better returns, and convince people to use them. Instead we are penalizing those who are likely to use these strategies.

And if you are looking for a motive, look how the economy used to be cyclical. Corporations would grow big and inefficient, so new lean risk-taking players would take their place, bringing innovation. This happened in 80s with Microsoft, this happened around Y2K with Google. Behind each of these companies was a well-educated risk-taking founder, and each of these companies brought innovation to the table. Except now they have reached the "inefficient behemoth" stage and are ready to be disrupted. Except, they learned from the history and are heavily investing in stigmatizing the qualities associated with previously known disruptors.

That said, you cannot stop the progress. The cutting edge of the innovation will move to China or whatever, and the U.S. will become the new Old World...

notional• 6 years ago

So we're supposed to be upset with the NYT because Coinbase discriminated against their employees and NYT reported on it?

ekam• 6 years ago

There’s a disparity sure but I don’t see how that necessarily proves discrimination

burger_moon• 6 years ago

Black tongue comments are really getting tiring to read on here.

Skillset• 6 years ago

I've never heard this term before: "black tongue comments." Wondering what's its origin?

xiphias2• 6 years ago

,,As many tech leaders publicly voiced support for Black Lives Matter protests, Black employees at Coinbase said on the Slack messaging platform that they were hurt by the silence of Mr. Armstrong and other executives about the matter. ''

Underpaying for the same job based on race is a very serious allegation, just like racism. But if being silent is caregorized as bullying / hurting in the same article, it's hard to take the article seriously. It should stay strictly within the potential legal issues.

bondarchuk• 6 years ago

They sure are mad.

daear• 6 years ago

The data is from 2018 and doesn't cover all of the employees, only groups they selected.

the company started to conduct a comprehensive review of compensation across the company in late 2018

Even assuming the data was accurate and unbiased, it was gathered before the company had this review.

When [the data collector] factored in stock options for Coinbase’s employees ... the compensation for women and men was roughly the same

A piece of information that's too nuanced for the title, I guess.

karlzt• 6 years ago

So many contradictions on Glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Coinbase-R...

knighthack• 6 years ago

For the accusations that the NYT makes, are the women and black employees doing exactly the same job as the others, or are they in different/easier/less technical roles?

I don't have access to the article, and I'd need to know that before I can make any judgment call.

Cryptocurrency Startup Underpaid Women and Black Employees, Data Shows

Related Stories