Chelsey Glasson (born 1982 or 1983) is an American user researcher, author, and workers' rights advocate. She sued Google, her former employer, for pregnancy discrimination, which ended in an undisclosed settlement after two years of litigation. She has successfully lobbied for pregnancy anti-discrimination and labor rights laws in Washington State. Her memoir, Black Box: A Pregnancy Discrimination Memoir, was published in 2023. She left tech to pursue a law career in 2024.
Education and early life Glasson was born in Ogallala, Nebraska. She comes from a large Family farm on father's side. Her mother is a social worker. Her family moved to Everett, Washington, when she was young near her mother's family and her father's job at Boeing. After the move, her parents divorced. Her mother spent part of her childhood in foster care and attempted to overdose on anxiety medication when Glasson was in the third grade. Glasson says was subjected to corporal punishment in the home by her father growing up, which led her to self-harm and an eating disorder.
Glasson's mother remarried when she was in the 4th grade, and she moved with her mother and step-father to Snohomish, Washington. She graduated from Snohomish High School in 2001. She took piano lessons, played in the school's jazz band, and says she was academically high-achieving. She won the title of Miss Snohomish County in 2003, qualifying her as a Miss Washington contestant. She made her platform about eating disorder awareness advocacy. Senator Harry Reid entered testimony Glasson gave on the topic into the Congressional Record in 2006.
She met her husband, Maxwell, while they were both taking summer courses at the University of Washington (UW). At the time, she was studying geography and international communication. She later moved with Maxwell to Zephyr Cove, Nevada, where he was from near South Lake Tahoe, California.
Glasson holds a Bachelor of Arts from UW in Communications. Glasson earned a Master of Science in Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) from UW in 2011. She holds certificates from Cornell University and University of Denver.
Glasson enrolled in law school in 2024 at Gonzaga University School of Law. As of October 2025, she is a student at the William S. Boyd School of Law in Las Vegas.
Career Glasson started her career in politics. She was an intern for Maria Cantwell, a United States Senator, and worked as a public policy analyst for the Nevada Legislature. During a project she was leading at that time, she was tasked with designing a promotional website, prompting her to enroll in graduate school to change careers. She said she realized she was enrolled in the wrong program halfway through earning a Master of Arts in Communication when she took a user experience design (UX) course, which led her to enroll in the HCDE graduate program at UW and transition into the field of UX. Glasson also said that she was inspired by a woman in executive leadership at Microsoft to find a tech career.
2010–2014 In 2010, while in graduate school, Glasson worked as an intern at T-Mobile, where she was later promoted to a full-time employee and laid off a few months later. After receiving her master's degree, Glasson worked at Salesforce.
She later joined Udacity as their lead user experience researcher, where she said she hoped to help democratize education. While at Udacity, Glasson developed a course under the direction of then-vice president of product and design Irene Au, "Intro to the Design of Everyday Things", which was based on the first two chapters of Don Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things, revised and expanded in 2013. The instructors of the asynchronous course were Glasson, Norman and design professor Kristian Simsarian. Glasson also implemented the reflective exercises.
Glasson became a guest editor for UX Magazine in 2013.
Google (2014–2019) Glasson joined Google in Mountain View, California, in 2014 as a user researcher, and was promoted several times into management. She said she was a strong performer, twice receiving a "superb" rating through the company's performance cycles. In July 2016, while Glasson was on her first of two maternity leaves, she relocated to Seattle, Washington, to work out of Google's Kirkland and Seattle offices. She said her manager, who was influential in the company's research department, allowed her to work remotely for the first few weeks after her leave ended. She said that this was due to her being a top performer. She was eventually promoted to managing a team of six, with another promotion planned prior to her second pregnancy. She left the company in August 2019 following what she alleged to be retaliation for reporting and experiencing pregnancy discrimination. Glasson did note that the company did not lay her off; however, they told her that she could not receive a promotion until she came back from maternity leave, and later, when she began to have more difficulties in her pregnancy, she was then informed that there may not be a management role for her upon her return to Google.
In early August 2019, Glasson posted a 2,300-word memo about her departure from Google on an internal message board, which went viral within the company and was reported upon outside of the company, gaining media attention. In the memo she described her nearly five years at Google, and how her treatment at the company changed drastically after she reported what she alleged to be inappropriate comments about one of her direct reports, a mother of two sets of twins, in the spring of 2018. She alleged that her manager tried to get Glasson to encourage the woman to leave her team, or the company altogether, and that after she reported the misconduct, instead of an investigation into the accused manager, her complaint was reported to the manager.
Glasson said she hired an attorney who sent Google a demand letter which requested a lateral internal transfer, an investigation into retaliation, and prevention of further retaliation. While she was healing from her caesarean section on an extended maternity leave, she said she was presented instead with a "walk-away agreement", offering three-months' salary worth of severance in exchange for leaving Google, release of legal claims, and signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Glasson refused to sign it, and stayed at the company until she voluntarily left in August 2019, after she says she was given a poor performance review during her second maternity leave. She said the performance review came after a "shallow" investigation into some of her discrimination claims, which ultimately resulted in Google finding no policy violations. Google suggested she utilize the company's employee assistance program (EAP) for free therapy, which she did.
Glasson said that as a manager at Google, she was instructed to encourage the use of EAP counseling to distressed employees. She said that, after her own experiences, she believes that human resources teams directing employees to mental health counselors is "meant to stop you in your tracks and silence you", and to communicate that "you're the problem".
In February 2020, Glasson wrote a Medium article alleging that in 2014 she was sexually harassed in a team off-site in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, by a company leader. Another Google employee also made allegations of sexual abuse against the same leader in 2015. Glasson alleged that after a colleague intervened in the incident in Cabo and reported the leader's behavior to human resources, the human resources team met with her in what she described as an "interrogation", and asked questions like, "How much did you have to drink that night?" She said that to her knowledge, no action was taken against the leader.
She has criticized Google for attempting to "tarnish the reputation" of people who speak out, instead of offering real support and fixing problems.
Glasson has since spoken to the Alphabet Workers Union about her experiences. She warned her former colleagues, "Being a whistleblower so often wreaks havoc on your mental and physical health," and discussed the need for affordable legal and mental health services.
2020–present After leaving Google, Glasson worked at Facebook. In October 2020, Facebook employees spoke out in response to COVID-19 pandemic policies they alleged unfairly benefited workers with children. In response, Glasson wrote a Medium article asking for childless employees to empathize with the struggles their parenting colleagues face, highlighting her own need to take emergency leave when her childcare provider was closed due to the pandemic. She said that implying that parental leave is some sort of vacation or unfair advantage "subjects parents to unconscious bias in performance reviews and downplays the type of support and benefits parents so desperately need".
Between 2021 and 2022, She worked at Compass, Inc., a real estate startup.
In 2021, Glasson contributed to The Tech Worker Handbook, a website of free resources for employees who may be interested in speaking out on issues at their employers.
In 2022, Glasson's story was the subject of the documentary Spread Thin directed by Bashirah Mack. It won the Audience Favorite award at the Workers Unite Film Festival in 2022.
In April 2024, Glasson announced she left the tech industry and enrolled in law school. She said she planned to work in employment law to fill what she believed to be a gender-based gap in the field.
Legal proceedings with Google Glasson filed a complaint against Google with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for pregnancy discrimination on September 3, 2019. The Seattle EEOC office began a probe into Glasson's claims in February 2020. , the case was still under investigation.
In the lawsuit, and her complaints, Glasson alleged that she was told by third parties that her manager was making derogatory comments about her, interfered with her projects, and started interviewing others to replace her. She also alleged that when she reported she was pregnant with her second child that her work environment worsened. She said she tried to move internally, but was convinced to stay on her team after she was misled into believing her manager was leaving. After receiving what she described as unfair and surprising negative feedback, she accepted a demotion on another team, where she alleged she was discouraged from supervisory duties prior to her maternity leave, as it would "rock the boat", and was excluded from manager meetings and off-sites.
Glasson further alleged that after she was diagnosed with placenta praevia, her new manager was dismissive, citing an NPR segment she had heard "debunk[ing] the benefits of bed rest", and her own experience ignoring medically-advised bed rest and delivering "the biggest presentations of [her] career" the day before her own child was born. Glasson further alleged that her manager informed her that she should not expect to be a manager when she returned from her leave.
Google condemned retaliatory behavior, both internally and externally. The company told the EEOC that they had "accommodated each of Ms. Glasson's pregnancy-related requests", and that there was "no support for Ms. Glasson's contention that she suffered discrimination or retaliation as a result". They further argued that Glasson was not given direct reports in her last role at the company because of insufficient headcount.
Glasson sent another demand letter to Google requesting the company work with the Center for Parental Leave Leadership to train managers at the company on supporting new and expecting parents to prevent others from facing the same types of discrimination and retaliation that she alleges she faced, and asking for payment for emotional damages and reimbursement for her legal expenses. Google declined the settlement offer.