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.

[4][6][7] She taught herself to code during middle school, creating a website for her guild in EverQuest[4][7] and continued experimenting with web development on the blogging platform LiveJournal.

[4] Scarlett experienced sexual abuse at a young age, and when she was in high school began battling drug addiction, eventually dropping out.

"[4] 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.

[15] Scarlett alleged in the amended lawsuit she was groped by Alex Afrasiabi, a former developer of World of Warcraft (WoW), at a work event,[16] 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.

[19] She outed the unnamed chief technology officer (CTO) from the lawsuit as Ben Kilgore in a series of tweets, claiming he had been the subject of numerous complaints about inappropriate behavior, some of which had also been reported to authorities years earlier.

[23] 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.

[22] The moderator was removed from his role without notice, and his public complaints about the company's treatment of volunteer workers went viral, gaining significant sympathy from the community.

After leaving in 2019 to work at Webflow, she wrote 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.

[33][34] Scarlett became the most vocal, public-facing advocate for workplace issues at Apple,[32][35][36] where employees previously rarely spoke to the media, especially about the company's "unprecedented" secretive culture.

[32][37][38] She said that while hundreds of people asked for help with concerns around pay equity, discrimination, and restrictive remote work policies, she was also accused of ruining the company's culture.

[38] On November 19, 2021, after briefly returning to work,[43] Scarlett quit,[34][38][44] 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.

Scarlett edited a letter that a group of employees had drafted to send to management, which spoke out against the hire as not being aligned with Apple's diversity and inclusion (D&I) policies and made a list of demands.

[35][49] 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.

"[59] 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".

[62] Apple has stated that they examine compensation annually and ensure that they maintain pay equity,[33] that the company, through existing policies and practices, already meet the objectives of the civil-rights audit,[61] and that "underrepresented communities represent nearly half of the U.S.

"[64][65] 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.

The NLRB prosecutor also charged Apple with constructive dismissal, meaning that the company forced Scarlett to quit absent grounds for termination.

[82] 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.

In the complaint, Scarlett alleged that Apple had tried to stipulate that she describe her choice to "leav[e] the company [as] being a personal decision, rather than fleeing a hostile work environment".

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.

[41] In December 2022, Apple said the audit found limited instances where provisions would infringe on a person's ability to speak about unlawful conduct and agreed to remove all concealment clauses from all employment contracts.

[94][95][96] 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.

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.

[103][104] 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.

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.

After seeking advice from Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest public policy employee who had led California's advocacy,[113][112] Scarlett worked with Senator Karen Keiser and House Representative Liz Berry on bills in the 2022 Washington State Legislature session.

[113][114] Scarlett and Chelsey Glasson, a former Google employee, testified in support of the house bill (HB 1795) they inspired,[114] which was passed into law on March 3, 2022.

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.