Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS / Contributor (Getty Images)
The cryptocurrency exchange startup Coinbase consistently paid women and people of color less than other employees performing similar jobs, new data from the New York Times has found, exposing a glaring pay gap that’s large even by the tech industry’s miserable standards.
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According to salary details analyzed by the Times for roughly 830 employees through the end of 2018, women employees at Coinbase were paid an average of $13,000, or 8 percent, less than men with comparable titles at the company. The 16 salaried Black employees included in the data also made significantly less, at an average of $11,500, or 7 percent, less than other employees in similar jobs.
Cryptocurrency Exchange Coinbase Reportedly Paid Women and People of Colour Like Shit
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Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS / Contributor, Getty Images
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The cryptocurrency exchange startup Coinbase consistently paid women and people of colour less than other employees performing similar jobs, new data from the New York Times has found, exposing a glaring pay gap that’s large even by the tech industry’s miserable standards.
SAN FRANCISCO â One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black.
The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency startup, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.
One of the employees was Alysa Butler, 25, who worked in recruiting. During her time at Coinbase, she said, she told her manager several times about how he and others excluded her from meetings and conversations, making her feel invisible. âMost people of color working in tech know that thereâs a diversity problem,â said Butler, who resigned in April 2019. âBut Iâve never experienced anything like Coinbase.â
Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange that enables users to trade digital currencies such as Bitcoin, announced yesterday that it had filed with the SEC to become the first Bitcoin-focused company to list on the stock market. This is big news for technology and business, at a time when Bitcoin is trading at unprecedented (but extremely volatile) prices. But Coinbase is also at the front of another, more concerning, trend in tech – one which raises questions about the kind of future such companies are building. At a Coinbase all-staff meeting in June to discuss the company’s response to the unlawful killing of George Floyd and the worldwide protests against racism that followed, employees “walked out” (by closing their laptops) when CEO Brian Armstrong refused to say whether the company would publicly state that “black lives matter”. He later did so on his personal Twitter account, but in September he wrote a blog post in which he stated that company would not engage on