In an era of nondisclosure agreements and forced arbitration, it can seem like one rule of working for a technology company is that you don’t talk about working for that technology company.
Cher Scarlett is breaking that rule.
Scarlett, originally of Walla Walla, Washington, has worked for multiple tech companies and, in the process, has become an outspoken labor rights organizer and whistleblower. From 2015 to 2016, she worked as a software engineer at the video game company Activision Blizzard. While there, she would often commiserate with coworkers about the company’s treatment of women and minority employees. Scarlett’s own experiences, she told The Washington Post in 2021, involved being “underpaid, harassed, and, on two separate occasions, groped at company events.”
After Scarlett left Blizzard, she continued to develop software at a range of other jobs: at World Wide Technology, Starbucks (where she also advocated for equitable pay), and Webflow, before being hired as a principal software engineer with the security team at Apple. In a personal essay published on Medium in December 2021, Scarlett described her career arc and how she felt she had finally found her “dream job” at Apple.
On May 12, 2021, Scarlett tweeted her opinion regarding Apple’s hiring of Antonio García Martínez, a controversial figure in the tech world. Martínez wrote the Silicon Valley memoir Chaos Monkeys, in which he described “most of the women in the Bay Area” as being “soft and weak.”
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