Cryptocurrency startup underpaid women, Blacks, company data show
The fast-growing cryptocurrency startup Coinbase has been rattled in recent months by tensions between executives and employees who said they were being treated unfairly because of their race or gender.
W hile ma nagement at the company has argued that the complaints were limited to a handful of employees, Coinbase’s own compensation data suggests that inequitable treatment of women and Black workers went far beyond a few disgruntled workers.
The data, recently obtained by The New York Times, indicated that women at C oi nb a s e were paid an average of $13,000, or 8%, less than men at comparable jobs and ranks within the company, according to an analysis of the figures, which included pay details for most of Coinbase’s roughly 830 employees at the end of 2018.
The picture was also unequal for the 16 salaried Black employees in the data. They were paid $11,500, or 7%, less than all other employees in similar jobs.
The pay disparities at Coinbase appear to be much larger than those in the tech industry as a whole, and at the few other tech companies that have had to release data.
The Coinbase analysis was conducted for The Times by Alexandra Marr, an economist who has provided statistical analysis for court cases involving pay bias. When she factored in stock options for Coinbase’s employees often an important part of pay at startups the compensation for women and men was roughly the same while the gap between white and Black employees grew to 11%.
Nine employees included in the data confirmed the accuracy of the figures about themselves and colleagues they knew.
The pay disparities are likely to add to tensions at the San Francisco company, which is riding a boom in the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It recently told regulators it intended to file for an initial public offering.
Numerous Black employees at Coinbase recently publicly complained about the discrimination they faced at the company. Several women who work at Coinbase have also complained internally about how they were hired, paid and promoted, according