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Cher Scarlett

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American software engineer and labor activist
Cher Scarlett
Headshot of Cher Scarlett
Born1984 or 1985 (age 39–40)
OccupationSoftware engineer
Known forWorkers' rights activism
Notable work#AppleToo movement
Children1

Cher Scarlett (born 1984 or 1985) is an American software engineer. She is known for her workers' rights activism and organizing at Apple and other technology companies.

Career and activism

In 2007, Scarlett saw an advertisement for a web development position at a real estate firm. She got the job, and worked there for a portion of the year before becoming a freelance developer. In 2011, Scarlett was recruited as a web developer at USA Today.

In 2015, Scarlett began a job as a software engineer at the Activision Blizzard video games studio, where she worked on their Battle.net platform. She says that she and her manager developed the games publisher's first interactive esports brackets and esports data API. She began to be more aware of discrimination and prejudice in the technology industry, and pressed the company's human resources department on gender-based pay discrimination she had observed. She left the company, and later provided testimony to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, who filed a 2021 lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation. During that lawsuit, Scarlett helped to direct others who had allegedly been victims of sexual assault while at the company to a group of women who were joining to sue the company, and to state and federal agencies. She also spoke publicly about her own experiences of underpayment, sexual harassment, and abuse while she was employed there.

After leaving Activision Blizzard, Scarlett worked at World Wide Technology. In 2017, she became a lead software engineer at Starbucks, and during her tenure, she taught a web development course for the University of Washington. At Starbucks, she joined others to organize an ultimately successful campaign to address gender-based pay disparities. After leaving the company in 2019, she wrote publicly about what she alleged to be a practice at Starbucks of paying lower wages to workers in areas that were predominantly Black or had high proportions of underrepresented groups. Through this writing, she began to be known as a worker's rights activist.

In 2019, Scarlett began working for Webflow. She continued to write, primarily advocating for fair pay for members of underrepresented groups.

During her career, Cher has contributed to many open-source software projects. In 2019, she became a maintainer for a website that advocates for healthy work–life balance in tech, 1x.engineer, a play on the myth of the 10x engineer meme. She also wrote a program that allows users to share what they are listening to on Spotify, open-sourced it, and wrote an article in Smashing Magazine on how to program it.

Apple

See also: Apple Inc. and Apple worker organizations

In early 2020, an Apple engineer referred Scarlett for a job on Apple's software security team, and she began working there in April 2020 as a principal software engineer.

A year later, Apple hired Antonio García Martínez, who had previously written in a book that women in the Bay Area were "soft and weak, cosseted and naive". After being approached by other employees who believed the hire was not aligned with Apple's stated principles on diversity and inclusion, Scarlett helped write a letter to management which spoke out against the hire and made a list of demands towards the company. The letter subsequently leaked, and it earned media attention. Garcia Martinez was fired shortly after the controversy.

In mid-2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple began requiring most employees to return to working in the office several days a week. Scarlett helped to lead a large group of employees organizing to be allowed to continue working remotely.

Also in 2021, Scarlett began to believe, based on anecdotal evidence and data from a website called levels.fyi, that there was a wage gap at Apple. When employees tried to organize internal surveys to more widely gather pay data, Apple quashed them several times. Scarlett launched her own survey, outside of Apple, which earned over 2,000 submissions. On September 1, 2021, she filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), alleging that Apple had violated the law in stopping employees from discussing their salaries.

Scarlett, along with Janneke Parrish and other Apple employees, is a leader of the #AppleToo movement. The group created a website and Medium page, on which they posted anonymous reports of mistreatment including verbal and sexual abuse, retaliation, discrimination, poor working conditions, and unequal pay experienced by Apple employees and contractors. Scarlett has said that Apple's culture of loyalty and secrecy has discouraged employees from speaking out. In September 2021, Scarlett said the group had received over 600 stories from employees. Scarlett later went on medical leave from Apple, after harassment from colleagues at Apple began to affect her mental health, then briefly returned to work in November. On November 17, 2021, she announced that she was voluntarily leaving Apple after reaching a confidential settlement with the company and withdrawing her NLRB charge.

Personal life

Scarlett was born in Walla Walla, Washington and grew up in Kirkland. She attended Juanita High School in the early 2000s, and says she earned a nearly perfect score on the SAT. Scarlett was interested in science and video gaming, and says she wanted to be a scientist and go to space after being a junior astronaut and studying biotechnology while in school. Scarlett taught herself to code during middle school, creating a website for her guild in EverQuest. She continued experimenting with web development on the blogging platform LiveJournal.

Scarlett experienced sexual abuse at a young age, and when she was in high school began battling drug addiction, eventually dropping out and attempting to overdose. Prior to starting her career, Scarlett worked as a stripper, but says getting pregnant prompted her to change her life. She has one child. Scarlett has bipolar disorder.

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

See also

References

  1. ^ Albergotti, Reed (October 14, 2021). "She pulled herself from addiction by learning to code. Now she's leading a worker uprising at Apple". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
  2. Takahashi, Dean (July 24, 2021). "Ex-Blizzard chief Mike Morhaime: To the Blizzard women …, I am extremely sorry that I failed you". VentureBeat. Retrieved October 15, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  3. Notis, Ari; Hernandez, Patricia (July 30, 2021). "The Kick-Ass Shit That Women In The Game Industry Don't Get Enough Credit For". Kotaku. Retrieved October 22, 2021.
  4. ^ Liao, Shannon (August 6, 2021). "At Blizzard, groping, free-flowing booze and fear of retaliation tainted 'magical' workplace". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
  5. Allsup, Maeve; Smith, Paige (July 26, 2021). "Activision 'Frat Boy' Suit Jolts Effort to Change Gaming Culture". Bloomberg. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  6. ^ Scarlett, Cher. "Cher 👩‍💻🔥 Principal Software Engineer". cher.dev. Retrieved November 17, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. Chan, Rosalie (May 24, 2020). "These developers run a website to buck the myth of the '10x engineer' who is a brilliant jerk and promote a healthy work-life balance in tech". Business Insider. Retrieved November 20, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  8. Scarlett, Cher (March 12, 2019). "Creating A Spotify-Powered App using Nuxt.js". Smashing Magazine. Retrieved November 19, 2021.
  9. ^ Ghaffary, Shirin; Molla, Rani (September 24, 2021). "The real stakes of Apple's battle over remote work". Vox. Retrieved October 14, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  10. Kimball, Whitney (August 24, 2021). "Apple Workers, Alleging Discrimination and a 'Culture of Secrecy,' Mobilize". Gizmodo. Retrieved November 8, 2021.
  11. ^ Sherr, Ian (September 23, 2021). "Apple's under unprecedented pressure as it prepares iPhone 13 launch". CNET. Retrieved October 14, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  12. ^ Schiffer, Zoe (September 30, 2021). "Apple's fortress of secrecy is crumbling from the inside". The Verge. Retrieved October 14, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  13. Schiffer, Zoe (May 25, 2021). "Apple employees are going public about workplace issues — and there's no going back". The Verge. Retrieved October 14, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  14. Clayton, James (October 11, 2021). "Silenced no more: A new era of tech whistleblowing?". BBC News. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
  15. ^ "Apple employees make US labour watchdog complaints". BBC News. September 3, 2021. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
  16. Love, Julia (September 3, 2021). "U.S. labor agency probes two complaints from Apple workers". Reuters. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
  17. ^ Nicas, Jack; Browning, Kellen (September 17, 2021). "Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on September 30, 2021. Retrieved October 15, 2021.
  18. Albergotti, Reed (November 2, 2021). "Employee fired by Apple files NLRB charge alleging retaliation by iPhone maker". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  19. Clark, Mitchell (November 17, 2021). "Apple pay equity and harassment organizer will leave the company after reaching a settlement". The Verge. Retrieved November 17, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  20. Tomlinson, Kerry (August 3, 2021). ""I had to invent this whole company to get work"". Ampere News. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  21. ^ "Falling down and getting back up with the help of code". No CS Degree. Retrieved November 8, 2021.

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