Chelsey Glasson

Career Glasson started her career in politics. She was an intern for Maria Cantwell, a United States Senator, and worked as a public policy analyst for the Nevada Legislature. During a project she was leading at that time, she was tasked with designing a promotional website, prompting her to enroll in graduate school to change careers. She said she realized she was enrolled in the wrong program halfway through earning a Master of Arts in Communication when she took a user experience design (UX) course, which led her to enroll in the HCDE graduate program at UW and transition into the field of UX.

Glasson became a guest editor for UX Magazine in 2013.

Google (2014–2019) Glasson joined Google in Mountain View, California, in 2014 as a user researcher, and was promoted several times into management. She said she was a strong performer, twice receiving a "superb" rating through the company's performance cycles. In July 2016, while Glasson was on her first of two maternity leaves, she relocated to Seattle, Washington, to work out of Google's Kirkland and Seattle offices. She said her manager, who was influential in the company's research department, allowed her to work remotely for the first few weeks after her leave ended. She said that this was due to her being a top performer. She was eventually promoted to managing a team of six, with another promotion planned prior to her second pregnancy. Glasson did note that the company did not lay her off; however, they told her that she could not receive a promotion until she came back from maternity leave, and later, when she began to have more difficulties in her pregnancy, she was then informed that there may not be a management role for her upon her return to Google.

In early August 2019, Glasson posted a 2,300-word memo about her departure from Google on an internal message board, which went viral within the company and was reported upon outside of the company, gaining media attention. In the memo she described her nearly five years at Google, and how her treatment at the company changed drastically after she reported what she alleged to be inappropriate comments about one of her direct reports, a mother of two sets of twins, in the spring of 2018. She alleged that her manager tried to get Glasson to encourage the woman to leave her team, or the company altogether, and that after she reported the misconduct, instead of an investigation into the accused manager, her complaint was reported to the manager.

Glasson said she hired an attorney who sent Google a demand letter which requested a lateral internal transfer, an investigation into retaliation, and prevention of further retaliation. While she was healing from her caesarean section on an extended maternity leave, she said she was presented instead with a "walk-away agreement", offering three-months' salary worth of severance in exchange for leaving Google, release of legal claims, and signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Glasson refused to sign it, and stayed at the company until she voluntarily left in August 2019,

Glasson said that as a manager at Google, she was instructed to encourage the use of EAP counseling to distressed employees. She said that, after her own experiences, she believes that human resources teams directing employees to mental health counselors is "meant to stop you in your tracks and silence you", and to communicate that "you're the problem".

She has criticized Google for attempting to "tarnish the reputation" of people who speak out, instead of offering real support and fixing problems.

Glasson has since spoken to the Alphabet Workers Union about her experiences. She warned her former colleagues, "Being a whistleblower so often wreaks havoc on your mental and physical health," and discussed the need for affordable legal and mental health services.

2020–present After leaving Google, Glasson worked at Facebook.

Between 2021 and 2022, She worked at Compass, Inc., a real estate startup.

In 2022, Glasson's story was the subject of the documentary Spread Thin directed by Bashirah Mack. It won the Audience Favorite award at the Workers Unite Film Festival in 2022.

In April 2024, Glasson announced she left the tech industry and enrolled in law school. She said she planned to work in employment law to fill what she believed to be a gender-based gap in the field. , the case was still under investigation.

Glasson further alleged that after she was diagnosed with placenta praevia, her new manager was dismissive, citing an NPR segment she had heard "debunk[ing] the benefits of bed rest", and her own experience ignoring medically-advised bed rest and delivering "the biggest presentations of [her] career" the day before her own child was born. Glasson further alleged that her manager informed her that she should not expect to be a manager when she returned from her leave. The company told the EEOC that they had "accommodated each of Ms. Glasson's pregnancy-related requests", and that there was "no support for Ms. Glasson's contention that she suffered discrimination or retaliation as a result". allowed the company to share information without the client's consent if it was "required to do so by a court order or other legal requirement". and the incident and therapist were placed under investigation by the Washington State Department of Health (WSDOH) after Glasson filed a complaint. She also started a GoFundMe campaign to help with the legal costs.

Glasson and Google reached an undisclosed settlement in February 2022. Glasson later wrote a book about her experiences, titled Black Box: A Pregnancy Discrimination Memoir, which was published in September 2023.

Legislation

Pregnancy discrimination In 2020, Glasson worked with Senator Karen Keiser in the hopes of extending the statute of limitations for reporting pregnancy discrimination. The law only allowed six months to report discrimination, which Keiser said "doesn't make sense" given that "it takes nine months or more to have a baby". The bill passed in both the senate and in the house in March 2020, and was later signed into law, extending the time pregnant workers have to file a complaint to one year.

Employee assistant program rights Glasson consulted with Senator Keiser on the incident with Lyra Health sharing her therapy information with Google during her lawsuit, and in November 2021, the senator sent a letter to the WSDOH regarding a "potential conflict" between employers and employees who utilize EAPs. Senator Keiser then introduced a bill, SB 5564, that aims to protect workers' rights, would make it an unlawful practice to take adverse action against workers based on their utilization of EAPs, and prohibit providers from sharing individually identifiable information about employees with their employers.

Whistleblower protection In October 2021, Glasson said she was inspired by Ifeoma Ozoma's work on California State Legislature's 2021 Silenced No More Act, which made it illegal for companies to use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) preventing employees from speaking about unlawful conduct such as discrimination and harassment. Glasson contacted Washington state lawmakers in hopes of having a similar law enacted. Senator Keiser and House Representative Liz Berry sponsored the legislation in thanks to outreach from Glasson and Cher Scarlett, a former Apple security engineer who has filed whistleblower complaints about Apple. Both Glasson and Scarlett testified before the Washington House of Representatives for House Bill 1795 on January 18, 2022.

Glasson testified that she was "intimidated" by the NDA she had signed when she joined the company, and by the terminology "Google confidential information", leading her to question whether or not she could speak to attorneys and government agencies about her experiences.

The bill was passed into law on March 3, 2022, and is effective as of June 9, 2022, with retroactive coverage. Google committed to Silenced No More protections for all employees following passage of the Washington legislation.

Glasson has also mentioned that her legislative advocacy has been enabled by her status as a tech worker, "With tech workers, part of the reason that we’re able to fight is that we are tech workers. There are some industries where your career would be completely annihilated if you were to speak out."