It's a fact, but it means nothing without context.
I punched a man in the face yesterday. To determine if I'm a violent person it's important to know whether I punched a man who was pushing his child on a swing set, or whether I punched a man who was crawling through a window in my home.
What context would exonerate Coinbase of fostering an environment that results in 75% of its Black employees feeling discriminated against? And if that context existed, why didn't Coinbase mention it in their preemptive rebuttal?
Without the additional context from the article, I think citing 75% is a bit misleading.
"When Coinbase announced it would be opening an office in Portland, Ore., several Black employees in the compliance department who worked remotely were told to move there or reapply for new jobs, four former employees said."
"All of the Black workers in the compliance division ended up among the group of 15 who left."
Without concrete evidence of discrimination in the article, my mind jumps to this being the pivotal cause of the stats, one team getting asked to relocate and that team being disproportionate in its demographics.
I know from co-workers that the company once had a strong stance against remote work and made limited exceptions. I can see that being a source of a lot of discontent. Asking folks to move to a new city is a big ask too; I could see the company having handled that poorly.
On the upside CB shifted to remote-first which should be great for being able to have a more diverse workforce. And contrary to some of the comments here, I take that as strong evidence of the ability for our leadership team to acknowledge mistakes and course correct.
Ok, let's accept what you say as fact and ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee in that department which wasn't made for any of the Black employees you are referencing. Let's also ignore the weirdness of 40% of the company's Black employees being on a single seemingly small team. That still leaves 7 other employees in other departments who left the company in a 6 month window due to feeling discriminated against. 35% is obviously a better number than 75%, but it doesn't allow you to dismiss this problem.
> ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee
Let's not ignore that this exception is being positioned as being based on skin color (racist motives), not job role, tenure, exceeding expectations, caregiving responsibilities, or any other plausible reason for an exception. That's a laughable, yet dangerous take. Incredibly inflammatory and accusatory.
Either Coinbase is an incredibly racist and black-unfriendly company, or some people would like you to believe that, and these accusations can all be unravelled to crying wolf, accusing others of downright illegal acts, without even filing a formal complaint to help others not suffer the same fate.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread, these harmless explanations for something that can be perceived as discriminatory are perfectly reasonable when there are only a few isolated incidents. However their believability has an inverse relationship to the number of accusations. When there is a clear pattern of behavior, as their is in this instance, it gets harder and harder to argue it is anything other than discriminatory.
And at a certain point the motive for these decisions doesn't even matter. If an overwhelming majority of Black employees feel they are being discriminated against at work, that is a huge failing for a company whether there is active discrimination happening or not.
It does not work that way (logically). Listing a 100 weak, baseless arguments is a debating tactic to confuse your opponents, not allowing them to address and debunk specifics (and if they still manage: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"). It also creates the appearance of smoke.
More likely: There is a activist political trend now, that has picked up a lot of steam. In that political view, society is racist, and whites at best profit from this, at worst contribute to this. Anything bad happening to a person of color is then used to accuse the racist system, or even individuals, of a heinous act, to force their hands to adopt your view, or deplatform them and their criticism as an obstacle to growth of your movement, for personal gain, as revenge for inequality, or as a coping mechanism.
Far easier to argue/reason/imagine that, than that Coinbase makes WFH exceptions due to skin color, or that black employee are correctly assessing skills and experience of co-workers and correctly identifying racism on skin color, when passed over for a promotion. And if you don't believe that racism is really a driver at Coinbase, the correct course seems to be to attack these allegations for what its actually doing, not to support it by falling victim to this poor-argument overload and resigning because it is too hard, or too sensitive, or too taboo, to call out this damaging and horrific behavior.
Maybe it doesn't work like that in high school debate clubs, but it works like that in the law. Look up concepts like circumstantial evidence and disparate impact.
We can infer someone is guilty of a crime from a collection of evidence suggesting they are guilty even without direct evidence.
We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.
Take it to court then. Collect circumstantial evidence and allow for an objective ruling on discrimination and racism in the workplace. If the circumstantial he-said she-said is of any substance, you can prove your guilt.
Don't do trial by (social) media. Especially when your accusations are incredibly heavy and damaging. Don't play judge when you are not capable of objectively looking at all the presented evidence.
Coinbase presented their side of the story: nothing went to court. No investigation found anything of substance. If the circumstantial evidence was so strong to hold up in court, why didn't it?
For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.
>Ms. Sawyerr said she had talked with four other Black employees about bringing a discrimination lawsuit against Coinbase, but the others backed out after being offered hefty severance payments in exchange for confidentiality agreements.
It never went to court because almost everyone involved was incentivized for it to not end up in court. Going to court is often a difficult, expensive, and likely damaging path to pursue for victims of a variety of crimes. The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.
>For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.
Once again, you are factually wrong with this comment. People can be thrown in jail based purely on an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence and companies can be punished for discriminatory behavior even if there is documented proof that there was no intent to discriminate.
Of course she said that. Big bad company silenced her co-suiters with money, after their spy devision learned that she was bringing suit. Now she has no recourse to go court herself, she absolutely needed those four other employees.
> The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.
It allows me to disqualify it as hearsay, and it allows you to think they offered severance payments, with the purpose to keep legit actual racism out of the courts.
Intent is of utmost importance for the law. Every lawyer and judge will agree to that. Punishment is increased for bad willful intent.
I give up. Clearly there is no point to this discussion anymore if you are going to dismiss any possible reporting as hearsay if it isn't argued in court. So I will simply leave this from the American Bar Association.[1]
> In contrast, a disparate-impact claim does not require proof of an intention to discriminate. Instead, showing that a facially neutral employment practice has a disproportionately adverse impact on a protected group states a prima facie case of unlawful disparate-impact discrimination.
What do you know, intent isn't needed for a valid case of discrimination.
We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.
No. That's totalitarian and evil. If someone is not intending to discriminate, then they are not guilty of anything and should not be "punished". It's not even slightly reasonable to expect every possible way of slicing a group of people to be reflective of the average gender/race data of the overall population because people are different: that's the entire argument for diversity to begin with.
That's the basic position that is alienating so many hundreds of millions of people and convincing them this kind of activism is toxic. It's why Trump won the first time and did much better than predicted the second. It's why this thread is full of people that think the NYT is being manipulative and deceptive. You may not punish people simply for not having enough black/women employees if they haven't actually done anything to discrimate: end of story.
Please respond to the actual comment made, not something you made up. No where did GP suggest that if every way you slice a group based on gender and race data isn't perfect they'll get in trouble.
They stated that discrimination, even if done without intent, is still discrimination. Please respond to that statement.
And how do you define discrimination if intent doesn't matter? If decisions don't matter then the only way to define discrimination is via observed results: if you have no black employees, it must be discrimination, even if nobody ever actually discriminated in an objective way. Which means you'd be punished for not matching some theoretical demographics.
The whole notion is ridiculous. The fact that California takes this stuff so seriously just makes it look like it's throwing away its tech lead, as viewed from afar.
You seem to be acting as this is some new extreme leftist view of discrimination. This comes from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You can find all the details and definitions here[1].
Affirmative action has always been a racist hypocrisy. The fact that there have always been leftists campaigning for it is irrelevant, as it's by far more common. America is indeed structurally racist: against whites and (sometimes) Asians. The fact that this has a long history doesn't make recent trends any more acceptable.
No one was talking about affirmative action, but ok.
And you reveal your true motivation when you say something like "America is indeed structurally racist: against whites". No one with any semblance of objectivity would agree with that.
> We can also punish someone for discrimination simply for exhibiting a pattern of discrimination regardless of intent to discriminate.
It is scary, right? "We can also punish" hides behind the "we", unclear if they mean "We, the people, the court system" or "We, the racial justice movement, public opinion". Then what is this "punishment"? A bad article in the NYT? Calling up your network and suppliers with a 100 people (with too much time and too much anger) to cancel you for being racist? Jail time or a fine for illegal activity?
They are power hungry, totalitarian, and evil. Other comments talk of "subconscious racism" or "white privilege". This comment demands responsibility for outcomes they perceive as unjust, where it is very unjust to demand demographic parity, when it is not possible to attain that, without severely dropping in quality (there are not enough Black people in tech to fill those positions with talent). So they demand you pay/invest to increase Black people in tech. But if too vocal or direct about it, they accuse you of "stating in general that Black people are less capable" as if reasoning from racist motives. So don't look to closely at the reason for not being able to hire as much Black people as society, activist, or the board wants you to.
This activism is a very strong and dangerous and toxic meme. It leads to Qanon levels of delusion, accusing criticism of racism, so it can't be attacked. Where Qanons see the deepstate and pedophiles when looking at government or big business, these activists see a racist society and neo-Nazi's when looking at government or big business. You can't change their minds. They've been in Whatsapp groups for years, pointing out targets for collective actions, and finding counters to often used criticism. It's why no activist would use the word "Identity Politics" even though that's the animal's name (evil Neo-Nazis use that term to attack our efforts!).
So that's why you hear: reverse racism is impossible! Racism has to do with power, and whites have all the power! When nearly every white person can recount cases of being discriminated against, and how terrible it made them feel. Accused of cultural appropriation for liking rap music. Challenged by Black men for having a Black girlfriend. Chosen as victim of robbery, because perceived weak and rich. Accused of getting your promotion, not due to hard work, but because your white old boys network favored your dumb white ass over a Black deserving queen.
If this NYT article was about over-representation of not white Libertarian crypto bros, but of over-representation of Jewish people in positions of power, you'd hear a different tune. Even suggesting that clear fact labels you as anti-Semitic. Apparently white people don't have enough shared culture, shared activism, to make racist anti-male anti-white anti-autist hit pieces like this controversial, even though we supposedly run the world, actively suppress entire races and genders, and create non-inclusive companies out of principle.
Just went back to double check the article and am actually not certain how you are getting to the number 75%. 11 employees cited a complaint to HR according to the article. Where are you getting the denominator for total number of black employees in 2019?
There's a data mismatch between the CB blog post and the article. CB cites that only 2-3 formal complaints were filed iirc.
11 employee complaints matches pretty closely with the PDX group.
--
FWIW I'm not dismissing the complaints. I've worked and studied in places where I've felt like an outsider; I've seen people make inappropriate comments about race+stereotypes in past work environments; I've also seen people make fishing claims of racial discrimination.
I wasn't on those teams in 2019, so the truth is I simply don't know.
From what I see today and the lack of concrete evidence in the article, I do have some doubts about the overall impression the article tries to give. I have the sense that certain information might have been omitted that might paint a clearer picture. I could totally be wrong as well.
The first sentence of the second paragraph of the article.
>The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company.
"[R]oughly three-quarters" implies there were likely either 19 or 21 employees Black employees at the company since 20 would be exactly three-quarters. I was just using 75% and 20 employees because that is the best estimate we got. The article also stated clearly that 8 Black employees were part of the PDX group.
The Coinbase rebuttal was worded very specifically.
>only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.
The New York Times wasn't being as narrow with their counting and they said:
>11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment
There is obvious middle ground between these two quotes. 11 people complained to their manager or HR at some point including potentially after they left the company however only 3 filed official complaints while working there. Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.
If this middle ground scenario transpired as I described, doesn't the NYT's recounting sound much closer to the truth than CB's? Also ask yourself who has a bigger incentive to stretch the truth here. Is it the newspaper that could instead report on literally anything else or the company that is being accused of discrimination?
> Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.
It really depends on the HR department, too. In most, reporting something as seemingly straightforward as an overt sexual assault will raise the question "how do you want to proceed." But they might not lay out what your actual options are -- or worse, they might just offer an ear and won't offer to act unless you demand it. Sometimes, they'll make it quite clear that a complaint will be a huge pain in the ass for everybody involved, especially the person reporting. HR should understand that there can be direct and indirect blow-back; that reporting misbehavior (especially of management, or worse, HR) can have both real and perceived consequences for the person reporting. HR departments cannot, generally, be trusted to police themselves if you can't go to them or above them, the only other option is the labor relations board. So much of the time, marginalized employees will either suck it up and endure the abuse, or quietly leave to keep their reputation intact.
So if anything, I see the discrepancy of 3 official reports and 11 complaints as a weak signal about how seriously HR takes complaints about racism at the company.
How about the CEO refusing to align with far left politics? Whether you think that is good or bad, that could well be the reason for them leaving, but it doesn't actually mean that there was overt racism.
Can you expand on what you mean by "far left politics"? Reminder, this happened in late 2018 and early 2019. It was before this year's round of Black Lives Matter protests. It was also before Coinbase issued its no politics edict. I am really struggling to think of what "far left politics" you are referring to here that would be important enough to the Black employees of Coinbase that it results in 75% of them leaving.
Most other tech firms make a specific effort to recruit Black people, promote them, and support causes Black people support. Coinbase's position is that while they support those things they want to focus on their cryptocurrency mission. Given that, the expected outcome would be 0 Black people working at Coinbase. If you were black, you'd much rather work for the firms actively trying to recruit and promote you.
"If you were black, you'd much rather work for the firms actively trying to recruit and promote you."
This is a tall assumption. People are more complicated than that, and so are their identities. What if you are a pro-life, strongly Catholic black person? I can definitely see the pro-diversity campaigners balking at the "pro-life" component of your identity.
> Baltimore said that he’s glad more people are talking about the problem, but that what’s really needed is “boots on the ground”: consistent money, time and leadership dedicated to actively bringing more Black tech professionals and investors into the industry.
That doesn't sound like "most companies" in the tech industry actively seeking and hiring minorities. Perhaps they do and articles like these are deceptive?
I would look up others but I think those three make the point. Companies are actively hiring underrepresented minorities. Yes some people think more effort should be put in but to say it isn't happening is being ignorant of reality.
> I would look up others but I think those three make the point. Companies are actively hiring underrepresented minorities.
I was questioning the assertion that it was most companies. Three companies, no statistics showing actual improvement, that doesn't make the point. Thanks for the links. It looks like Google is having trouble achieving this goal, since the article you linked shows the same percentage of minorities year to year. Apple says they have made progress, which is good. The facebook link doesn't have any numbers. Apple says "53% of new hires in the U.S. are from historically underrepresented groups in tech" but it doesn't give a timeframe or provide statistics that show how much of their workforce is minority or how much improvement they have made. I'm not sure that public relations boilerplate actually translates to a commitment to a diverse workforce.
To repeat myself, this happened in late 2018 and early 2019. That was before the round of protests that you are speaking about. What far left political issue was Coinbase potentially fighting against during the relevant time window that would have pushed these employees out?
Also I think you mean Trevor Noah and not Noah Trevor.
Black Democrats (most Black people are Democrats, something for which there is some social pressure) are generally more conservative, and significantly more religious, than other Democrats. So: no, this isn't responsive to what I said.
Lol, that’s understating it a bit. The president elect said “you ain’t black” to black people who even consider Trump. An old white man confidently telling black people their identity is jeopardized if they even consider not voting for him.
"Uncle Tom" and "Not Black Enough" have nothing to do with far-leftism. As I just said, with an academic source: Black people are relatively more conservative than other Democrats. To the extent that we're including Black Republicans in the mix, the analysis gets even weirder.
That’s the problem. Black lives mattering is a political issue only to those of privilege. I can’t believe we’re actually having political debate if certain people’s lives should matter or not.
I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.
Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
>I can think of contexts, especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions), but I don't know if developing hypothetical scenarios is useful.
N = 15 while p ≈ 20. It has been a while since I have taken a stats class, but that sample seems plenty large enough to me.
>Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
Corroborating is exactly what journalists do. From the article:
>five people with knowledge of the situation said.
>But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations
>according to a recording of the session shared with The New York Times
>In a company email he sent later, which was also shared with The Times
>wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.
>three people briefed on the situation said
>according to a recording of the event
>according to a copy of the message seen by The Times
>according to a copy reviewed by The Times.
>two people with knowledge of the situation said
The NYT talked to dozens of people, watched/listened to multiple recordings, and viewed numerous emails and Slack messages. This story is corroborated.
Addressing only the viability of the sample for basic binomial analysis, the sample size is on the small end. This would be okay if we could reasonably expect the underlying events to follow identical and independent distributions, but when we know the people involved worked together that assumption is clearly void. Unfortunately this means we really can’t use any sort of statistical analysis on this datum. The models just don’t support it.
If you order the claims in the article on a scale of not racist at all to clearly racist, you'll see basically all of the corroboration comes from claims on the left side of that scale, and few if any on the right side. The claims I was specifically thinking about were things like:
> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.
These have no corroboration, even though they allegedly happened in front of multiple coworkers.
We don't need to corroborate each individual complaint. The story here isn't that one employee was passed over for a promotion. The story is the trend that all these anecdotes support. There is corroboration for the trend.
But the point is that the corroborations are all on the lesser or non-complaints of the article, not the most egregious ones. To make an extreme example, posting a series of actual facts that culminate in aliens have visited earth doesn't make the latter assertion any more true.
edit: Sorry, I'm the poster from above, I just posted from my phone which has a different account logged in that I originally intended to give hiring advice unlinked to my main account(opsec fail).
The egregious complaints are corroborated by the other egregious complaints.
Let's use another example in which evidence is hard to find: sexual assault. If one woman accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, the burden of proof for her story is high. She would need some pretty strong evidence to get Cosby charged let alone convicted. She probably wouldn't even receive coverage in the mainstream media without some other form of evidence. However the entire situation would change if she was one of 60 women coming forward. Suddenly the burden of proof for that first woman is greatly diminished. Each individual's story is corroborated by someone else having a very similar story.
Well I guess some witnesses lied over three centuries ago so we can't trust any group of people anymore for the rest of history. It is a bummer how that worked out.
Interestingly, "carrying a gun" is an American stereotype here in Europe, not race-specific.
Isn't there like 400 million guns in private hands in the US? If so, the assumption that pretty much anyone you meet in the street might have concealed gun on them is not absurd per se.
But speaking about it aloud seems strange, yes.
"passed over for promotions"
This is the oldest workplace complaint ever and happens in racially homogeneous countries all the time. Favoritism in the workplace is probably as old as the pyramids.
> especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions)
And those people would be wrong. It's incorrect to dismiss a study based on sample size without a discussion of significance and effect size in the context of the data.
Moreover I reject the premise that you should be assessing this story quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But if you insist: what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
Okay - one context is where one department has a large number of black people, and that department is defragged for purely business reasons to a different office across the country. Most people never choose the relocation package, and so a big chunk of black employees end up quitting. That's the event that triggered 8 black employees of the 15 who left as I understand it from the article.
> what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
I completely agree that it's a very bad look. It is probably even more likely than not that given those facts, it is due to racism. I guess the question comes down to, philosophically, how one answers the following question: In the quest to eradicate racism and racists, is it better to be over-zealous and destroy a few non-racists to make sure you get all the actual racists(the chemo approach) - or is it better to be slightly more circumspect and let a few racists slip through the cracks so that far fewer non-racists are punished (the US judicial system ideal)?
But this question assumes that the root cause of the problem is that Coinbase has a disproportionately high number of "bad apples." To me that's exactly backwards; it seems much more likely that institutional culture tolerates and even encourages racism.
I punched a man in the face yesterday. To determine if I'm a violent person it's important to know whether I punched a man who was pushing his child on a swing set, or whether I punched a man who was crawling through a window in my home.