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Cher Scarlett (born 1984 or 1985) is an American software developer known for her activism in anti-discrimination and workers rights organizing at Apple and other software companies.

Personal life

Scarlett grew up in Kirkland, Washington. She did well in school and was interested in astronautics and video gaming. Scarlett experienced sexual abuse at a young age, and when she was in high school began battling drug addiction.

Scarlett has bipolar disorder. Scarlett has a daughter.

Career and activism

In 2007, while pregnant with her daughter, Scarlett saw an advertisement for a web development position at a real estate firm. She had learned to code when she was younger, experimenting with web development on the blogging platform LiveJournal. She got the job, and worked there for a portion of the year before becoming a freelance developer. In 2011, Scarlett began working as a web developer at USA Today.

In 2015, Scarlett began a job at the Activision-Blizzard video games studio. 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, which would later be subject to a 2021 lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing over alleged systemic discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation. During that lawsuit, Scarlett helped to direct women who had allegedly been victims of sexual assault while at the company to a group of women who were joining to sue the company.

After leaving Activision-Blizzard, Scarlett worked at World Wide Technology, then became a lead software engineer at Starbucks. 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.

Apple

In early 2020, an Apple engineer referred Scarlett for a job on Apple's software security team, and she began working there. Later that year, Apple hired Antonio García Martínez, who had previously written in a book that women int he Bay Area were "soft and weak, cosseted and naive". After being approached by other employees who believed the hire was not in keeping with Apple's stated principles on diversity and inclusion, Scarlett wrote a letter to speak out against the hire, and making a list of demands towards the company. She posted the letter on Twitter, and it earned media attention; Garcia Martinez left the company 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, that there was a wage gap at Apple. When employees tried to organize an internal survey to gather pay data, Apple quashed it. Scarlett launched her own survey, outside of Apple, and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Apple had stopped employees from discussing their salaries.

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. 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)