Cher Scarlett (born ) is an American workers' rights activist, software engineer, and writer. She has organized staff at Apple, Activision Blizzard, and Starbucks.
Scarlett, who has bipolar disorder, experienced struggles in her early life, leading her to drop out of high school and attempt to overdose. Self-taught web development skills from her adolescence in the late 1990s allowed her to overcome a lack of formal education and build a software engineering career after the birth of her child. Scarlett's experiences and observations in a male-dominated occupation led her to become a workers' rights advocate and critic of technology and corporations.
She was a leader of the #AppleToo movement, which gathered and shared stories of mistreatment from current and former Apple employees, and was a founder of Apple Together, a solidarity union, where she remains an advisor. Scarlett also filed complaints against Apple with the National Labor Relations Board and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. After months of activism at the company, Scarlett voluntarily resigned with a now-defunct settlement after she says she was harassed, intimidated, and retaliated against.
Scarlett has successfully lobbied for labor laws in Washington state. She also advocated for Apple shareholder proposals regarding civil rights and concealment clauses, the first to be approved by the company's shareholders in more than 10 years.
Early life and education
Scarlett was born in Walla Walla, Washington, and grew up in Kirkland with her mother, who worked in construction. Her father and step-father were mostly absent from her life. She said she grew up poor, coming from generational poverty in a family of farm laborers that settled in Eastern Washington descended from the Volga Germans.
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. She taught herself to code during middle school, creating a website for her guild in EverQuest and 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. She also experienced an incident of commercial sexual exploitation in 2005, which led her to a suicide attempt. Scarlett later provided information to federal authorities that led to the arrest of one of the perpetrators in 2018. Prior to starting her career, Scarlett worked as a stripper, but she says getting pregnant prompted her to change her life.
Scarlett also worked in the service industry, including working "overnights" at Krispy Kreme, while her daughter was young.
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. She said that her manager and she developed the games publisher's first interactive esports brackets and esports data API, 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 left Blizzard in 2016, and in 2021, provided testimony to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing as part of a lawsuit alleging systemic discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation. 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.