Not two weeks ago, Ashley Gjøvik filed a complaint with the U.S. labor board charging her employer, Apple, with unlawful retaliation. She’d become too vocal, she said, about her experiences with sexism and concerns about safety in the workplace. The company wanted her stopped.
On Thursday, she was fired.
Gjøvik is one of two employees who filed charges against Apple last month with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, alleging harassment and intimidation at the company. (The agency investigates all charges and prosecutes those it can substantiate.) The complaints follow a rare burst of employee activism at Apple, manifesting last month under the hashtag #AppleToo — an overt reference to 2017's Me Too movement, which toppled powerful men long impervious to claims of misconduct.
The employees, who said they were out to expose patterns of discrimination and abuse within Apple, said it had flown under the radar for too long.