AppleToo
#AppleToo was a movement at Apple Inc. that started in August 2021 during a period of employee unrest centered primarily on the maltreatment of women at the company.
In September and October 2024, the National Labor Relations Board's prosecuting attorney filed charges against Apple for unlawful rules, shutting down discussions of gender-based pay equity, and for illegally firing Cher Scarlett and Janneke Parrish, the co-leaders of #AppleToo.
[7] In the book, García Martínez wrote that women in the San Francisco bay area were "soft and weak" and "useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
[15] In September 1991, Macworld reported employee criticism of Apple's failure to promote women as often as men on a tool called AppleLink.
[25] Lauren Goode, a female tech reporter, said in a Wired podcast that the change to a virtual event hid the lack of diversity at WWDC.
[28] #AppleToo is a reference to the #MeToo movement and the sharing of personal stories — in the case of Apple, about alleged sexual harassment and assault, gender and racial discrimination, verbal abuse, retaliation, ableism, and the mishandling of complaints by HR and management.
[29][30][31][32] In August 2021, after encouraging other women on Twitter to come forward about a culture of sexual harassment and abuse at her former employer, Activision Blizzard, Cher Scarlett organized a similar movement at Apple.
[34][32][31] Program manager Janneke Parrish joined as a co-leader and published some of the personal stories of past and current Apple workers including contractors.
[39] On September 3, 2021, the group published an open letter to Cook and the rest of the executive team, calling for signatures from fellow workers.
"[46] More than a dozen additional women went to the press, including program manager Ashley Gjøvik, both on the record and anonymously, about alleged gender pay gaps, discrimination, and the mishandling of sexual harassment and assault at Apple.
[48] In late 2021, Cher Scarlett filed three charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against Apple for stifling employees from collecting wage data and discussing their salaries, for fostering a culture of harassment and abuse with unlawful rules, and for the memo sent by Cook to staff.
[51][52] In November 2021, Janneke Parrish filed wrongful termination charge with the NLRB in which she alleged the investigation and firing for leaking a recording of the townhall was "based upon false and pretextual reasons" and retaliation for her work with #AppleToo.
The prosecutor also charged Apple with restricting employee social media and Slack usage and for suppressing discussions of a gender-based wage gap in violation of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA).
Investment firms said that attempts to block such shareholder actions would put brand equity at companies with progressive values at risk.
[69] In response to a no-action request filed by Apple with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which claimed that it was not Apple's practice to use NDAs in employment contracts that inhibit an employee's ability to speak about working conditions, Cher Scarlett filed a whistleblower tip with the agency and shared a severance agreement that stipulated what she was allowed to say about her departure, which was validated by Business Insider.
[70][71] The shareholder-prompted audit found that instances existed where NDAs would infringe on an employee's right to speak on unlawful conduct and agreed to remove all concealment clauses from employment contracts retroactively.
[72] Laws enacted in California and Washington after the #AppleToo event barred the use of NDAs in employment contracts in relation to harassment, discrimination, and other unlawful activity.
[75][76] In its coverage, Ars Technica quoted the lawsuit as alleging, "The longer a woman works at Apple, the larger the gap in compensation she receives compared to similarly situated men.
"[77] In a contribution to Forbes, a psychologist and professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kim Elsesser, attributed the link between salary expectations and history to the anchoring effect, a phenomenon that causes people to value their worth on previous pay.
