Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed a bill to expand protections for people who speak up about discrimination in the workplace.
A new website arrived to offer tech workers advice on how to come forward about mistreatment by their employers.
And Apple responded to a shareholder proposal that asked it to assess how it used confidentiality agreements in employee harassment and discrimination cases.
The disparate developments had one thing — or, rather, a person — in common: Ifeoma Ozoma.
Since last year, Ms. Ozoma, 29, a former employee of Pinterest, Facebook and Google, has emerged as a central figure among tech whistle-blowers. The Yale-educated daughter of Nigerian immigrants, she has supported and mentored tech workers who needed help speaking out, pushed for more legal protections for those employees and urged tech companies and their shareholders to change their whistle-blower policies.
She helped inspire and pass the new California law, the Silenced No More Act, which prohibits companies from using nondisclosure agreements to squelch workers who speak up against discrimination in any form. Ms. Ozoma also released a website, The Tech Worker Handbook, which provides information on whether and how workers should blow the whistle.
“It’s really sad to me that we still have such a lack of accountability within the tech industry that individuals have to do it” by speaking up, Ms. Ozoma said in an interview.
Her efforts — which have alienated at least one ally...
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