Cher Scarlett

Career and activism

2007–2015 In 2007, Scarlett worked briefly in a web development position at a real-estate firm. She worked as a freelance developer until 2011, when she was recruited as a web developer at USA Today, where her manager referred to her as a "talented developer".

Activision Blizzard (2015–2016)

In 2015, Scarlett was hired as a software engineer at Activision Blizzard and worked on their Battle.net platform. While there, she pressed the human resources department on gender-based pay discrimination and sexism she had observed. and her manager told The Washington Post that she was an "incredibly driven" employee and "shows passion with every project she works on and she doesn't stop until she gets it right." Scarlett encouraged others to come forward, helped direct them to the agency, and later supported a walkout. Scarlett alleged in the amended lawsuit she was groped by Alex Afrasiabi, a former developer of World of Warcraft (WoW), at a work event, who was named as "a blatant example" of Blizzard's "refusal to deal with a harasser because of his seniority/position," and that she had been told by a friend that he had done the same to her the year prior at BlizzCon. Afrasiabi was fired in 2020.

Scarlett spoke publicly about what she alleged to be poor treatment of female employees through underpayment, sexual harassment, and abuse. Scarlett and others referred to the behavior described in the lawsuit as normalized at the company, This was later corroborated by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.

She also spoke about what she said was improper handling of a 2018 incident when she outed one of Overwatch League's unpaid moderators for previously hoarding and distributing revenge porn. A few hours later, Scarlett wrote a Medium post about her history with the moderator, dating back to 2012 when Twitch was still small and she livestreamed WoW. The moderator initially denied the allegations, but later retracted his denial and apologized. Blizzard later dissolved community moderation teams.

Apple (2020–2021)

In April 2020, Scarlett began working as a principal software engineer on Apple's software security team, where she worked remotely from St. Louis, and later, the Seattle metropolitan area. Scarlett became the most vocal, public-facing advocate for workplace issues at Apple, where employees previously rarely spoke to the media, especially about the company's "unprecedented" secretive culture. Scarlett was credited for inspiring others to speak out, but was also criticized for breaking the company's unwritten rules, such as not speaking unsolicited about Apple publicly. Scarlett said that Apple's "cult-like" and "self-policing" culture of loyalty and secrecy has discouraged employees from speaking out, into requesting medical leave in September 2021, She said she felt forced to comply, and was subsequently granted paid time off (PTO) instead of medical leave. Scarlett described several incidents of harassment from colleagues at Apple, including a "nasty email" from a teammate she tried unsuccessfully to address with their manager, Though the company helped her take safety precautions, Scarlett said that Apple enabled the abuse by not condemning the behavior. Scarlett quit, later alleging she was isolated, intimidated and retaliated against, after filing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaints against the company.

Antonio García Martínez In May 2021, Scarlett tweeted that she was "gutted" by the hiring of Antonio García Martínez, and that she "believe in leadership to do the right thing". After the letter leaked to the press, which she said triggered an onset of abuse, based on misconceptions that she had written the letter. Garcia Martinez was quickly fired, Scarlett helped to lead employees in organizing to be allowed to continue working remotely.

Apple responded to the group's requests for more flexible remote work policies stating that "in-person collaboration is essential" to the company's culture and future. Scarlett criticized the company's response saying, "There's this idea that people skateboarding around tech campuses are bumping into each other and coming up with great new inventions. That's just not true," pointing to the company's already-distributed workforce.

Apple's return-to-work plans were later delayed several times due to surging COVID-19 cases. AppleToo movement and worker organizing

Scarlett was a leader of the #AppleToo movement. Parrish was later fired, and the group started more formally organizing as Apple Together, a solidarity union which Scarlett and Parrish helped found and as of May 2022, were advisors for. Organizers said that they are not being paid fairly for the work they are doing, and that many are struggling to survive. Scarlett asked The Washington Post, "If the richest company in the world won't pay its workers enough to live, who will?" and that they have "always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted". She said charts she tweeted showed "alarming" trends, alleging "white men have much more opportunities to advance within the company, and are more likely to be working in technical roles". She said her coworkers wanted "a third-party investigation into salary data, or an audit that [employees] have insight into." Apple recommended shareholders vote against the proposal, for the first time in 10 years.

Apple has stated that they examine compensation annually and ensure that they maintain pay equity,

Also due to Scarlett's, Parrish's, and other Apple workers' charges over 2021 and 2022 with the NLRB against Apple, SOC, TAM, and SEIU introduced an additional shareholder proposal in September 2022 asking for a "workers' rights assessment."

Federal labor board charges On September 1, 2021, Scarlett filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that Apple had violated the law in stopping employees from discussing their salaries and gathering data to examine racial or gender-based wage gaps.

Scarlett and the company reached a non-board settlement in November 2021, which included a severance of one year's pay to be split with her attorneys, and withdrawal of the charge, under the condition that Apple make a "public, visible affirmation" that employees could freely discuss workplace conditions and pay. Scarlett tweeted that the affirmation was one of four demands she had sent to the company on September 2, 2021. The company posted the stipulated notice, but only during the week of Thanksgiving, which Apple had given the entire company off. As a result, she said that Apple had not upheld the agreement, and she would not be making another request to withdraw the charge.

In January 2023, the NLRB determined 3 of Scarlett's charges had merit and charged Apple with unlawfully surveilling employees, suppressing worker organizing on social media, and hindering wage discussions in October 2024. The NLRB prosecutor also charged Apple with constructive dismissal, meaning that the company forced Scarlett to quit absent grounds for termination. The NLRB found that Apple told Scarlett to stop posting on social media about the company and pressured her to take medical leave. Participants in the survey were interrogated about their involvement with Scarlett and the wage survey, and according to the complaint, managers at Apple threatened participants in public activism and the wage survey with demotions. and social impact investing firms Whistle Capital and Nia Impact Capital (Nia) filed a shareholder proposal at Apple on the use of concealment clauses. On October 25, 2021, Scarlett filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC over Apple's statements in a no-action letter claiming that the company does not use non-disclosure agreements" (NDAs) in the context of harassment, discrimination, and other unlawful acts." Scarlett provided the SEC and, later, Nia, with the NDA that Apple had included as a part of a separation agreement, which she had refused to sign. In the complaint, Scarlett alleged that Apple had tried to stipulate that she describe her choice to "leav the company [as] being a personal decision, rather than fleeing a hostile work environment".

During the course of her settlement negotiations with Apple, Scarlett also asked for the company to add the language "Nothing in this agreement prevents you from discussing or disclosing information about unlawful acts in the workplace, such as harassment or discrimination or any other conduct that you have reason to believe is unlawful," which came from a law that would be effective in California a few months later in January 2022. The company refused at the time, but later said in a proxy statement to the SEC, which recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal, that it would add the language to all separation agreements in the United States. Shareholders voted to approve the proposal on March 4, 2022.

Scarlett received one of five payments of a $213,000 severance package, and received notice Apple would not be paying her attorneys, or making future severance and COBRA payments, because she "repeatedly" breached her NDA. The letter also stated Apple was "preserving its right to seek liquidated damage for each separate breach", to which Scarlett said, "I don't have anything for them to take". In an essay for The Olympian, Scarlett, along with Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, who had both signed NDAs in settlements with Fox News, described a financial cost to speaking out and being driven from their careers and urged Washington to pass legislature making such NDAs illegal. Scarlett ran a GoFundMe campaign to pay her attorneys' fees.

2021–present Scarlett is on the Tech Worker Committee of The Solidarity Fund, an emergency fund for Apple and Netflix workers involved with organizing. The fund was created by Liz Fong-Jones and Coworker.org. Of the fund, Scarlett said, "There's a solidarity movement happening and there are hundreds of people from different parts of the company that are coming together to support the most vulnerable". According to Jess Kutch, who co-founded Coworker.org, the call to action resulted in a real time increase of "significantly large" contributions from Apple employees.

In early 2022, Scarlett helped Starbucks baristas in the 2021–2022 unionization effort, partnering with Workers United (WU), a trade union affiliated with Service Employees International Union. While she was engaged in that effort, a Grand Central Terminal Apple retail employee reached out to her "distraught" after their union organizing committee had lost its partnership with their trade union. Scarlett connected the workers with her Starbucks WU contact,

Scarlett joined game studio ControlZee in March 2022 to work on a game called dot big bang, a game creation platform that allows users to build multiplayer video games.

Scarlett was one of five expert researchers involved in a March 2022 Financial Times (FT) investigation into "Russia's Google", Yandex. Scarlett and the other researchers found that Yandex was harvesting and storing sensitive information such as a user's device fingerprint and IP address in Russia, which the Kremlin could legally demand access to. Yandex said the information obtained could "theoretically" be used by Russian officials to identify persons, but it would be "extremely hard". The team of researchers said that users of more than 52,000 applications, including applications like virtual private networks (VPNs) and secure messaging platforms launched during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, targeted at Ukrainians, would be unaware of the presence of Russian software because it was hidden in a software development kit (SDK) called AppMetrica, "piggybacking" on permissions granted to trusted applications. Scarlett said users were "trying to be proactive in being more safe, but actually making [themselves] more vulnerable". The research started with Zach Edwards, a researcher at the nonprofit organization Me2B Alliance, as part of an application audit campaign. Opera, which operates a mobile web browser of the same name, and some other application developers said they disabled the software and were working on removing it entirely. Google acknowledged they could be doing more to inform users about SDKs and agreed to conduct an investigation into the researchers' findings. Apple denied any SDKs could leech data without user knowledge.

Labor charges against Mozilla In April 2022, The Washington Post reported that Scarlett believed she may have been turned down for positions at Mozilla and Epic Games due to her labor organizing at Apple. She filed charges with the NLRB against both companies. The general counsel's office alleged that Mozilla rejected her "to discourage employees from engaging" in protected activities. On January 14, 2025, Mozilla settled the case with the NLRB. They agreed to pay $300,000 in lost wages and benefits to Scarlett and to post a notice informing employees of the settlement, their rights under the NLRA, and a promise not to retaliate.

Facial recognition software criticism Scarlett has called for scrutiny and regulation of facial recognition software (FRS).

A Vice News Tonight investigation found that PimEyes primary use was for stalking and warned it could be the end of privacy. The implications of Scarlett's experience with facial recognition software raised questions about privacy and control over one's own face. She called the technology leap to using a picture of someone's face to find out everything about them "Star Trek stuff."

Select publications

Legislation

Whistleblower protection In 2021, Scarlett led efforts in Washington state to reform employer secrecy practices. She lobbied for legislation in her home state of Washington similar to the Silenced No More Act, a bill in California that prevents employers from silencing whistleblowers. After seeking advice from Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest public policy employee who had led California's advocacy, Scarlett and Chelsey Glasson, a former Google employee, testified in support of the house bill (HB 1795) they inspired, It was effective with retroactive coverage as of June 9, 2022. Due to their secrecy reform work, Ozoma and Scarlett became leaders of tech accountability. Apple added the language to their employment contracts, after refusing to do so as part of Scarlett's separation agreement. or more employees to post salary information on its job postings, including for internal transfers for existing employees. Scarlett had relocated while she was at Apple and requests for her new compensation were unanswered until after she moved. Scarlett testified in support of the bill on February 16, 2022, and spoke about her own wages being suppressed during her career because her past employers asked for her salary expectations, instead of sharing what the role paid. She said that underrepresented groups are often not in a position to negotiate, and the "veil of secrecy" around compensation results in wage gaps. The bill was passed into law on March 1, 2022. It is effective as of January 1, 2023. The bill was signed by the governor in April, effective March 31, 2024.

Personal life Scarlett has Bipolar I disorder and ADHD.

Scarlett is active on Twitter, where she is known for her advocacy for marginalized groups.