The Google employee that set off a viral firestorm when she published an anonymous memo alleging the tech giant discriminates and retaliates against pregnant women has identified herself and is sharing her story publicly for the first time. 

Chelsey Glasson, a 36-year-old Seattle mom, shared her tale exclusively with the media outlet Fast Company and told them over a “series of interviews with supporting documentation” how she went from a top performer at the company to a pariah on the verge of termination after she underwent a complicated pregnancy. 

When Glasson started with Google in March 2014 doing user research, she was soon promoted several times and twice received a performance score that ranked in the top 3-5% of “Googlers”, or employees who work for the tech behemoth. 

At first, the discrimination Glasson witnessed was against another mom on her team between February and April 2018 who’d recently had two sets of twins, the outlet reported. 

“I noticed that my boss started making some really inappropriate comments like, ‘I think she might be trying to get pregnant again, and she’s just really overly emotional when pregnant and hard to work with,’” Glasson told Fast Company. 

“It started small and then very quickly progressed to [comments like]: ‘I think this person would be much better suited at a lower tier company . . .  She very clearly was trying to get me to kick this person off the team.”

Startled by the remarks, Glasson reached out to HR to complain about the manager, who told the boss what Glasson had said. 

That’s when “work became a war zone.”

“I remember feeling this overwhelming anxiety just walking in the door. Every single project I touched after that point, she vetoed,” Glasson explained. “The ultimate blow was finding out she was actively interviewing people to replace me.” 

The different treatment was very “obvious” to Glasson because she and her boss had a stellar relationship prior to the complaint and was already preparing for Glasson’s second promotion under her. 

In the midst of this, Glasson became pregnant and the more she shared with HR and senior management, “the worse the relation [from my boss] became,” Glasson said. 

“I was worried about how the stress was impacting my pregnancy,” Glasson said. 

She tried to move on to another department within Google and when she was offered a new job, senior management and her boss’s manager asked her to say and said the boss she was having issues with was leaving the team. 

So she stayed on with that unit but “the retaliation continued,” Glasson said. 

“A little over a month passed, and then my [boss’s manager] calls me into a meeting and tells me [my] boss is not leaving the team—and, by the way, ‘your boss is telling me that you’re not meeting expectations for your role.,’” Glasson said. 

“I was like, ‘I’m pregnant. I turned down a job offer because you told me that my boss was leaving and that I’m a valued team member. You put me in a really tough position.’ He just pushed my concerns aside and said, ‘I bet that role that you were originally offered is still on the table.’”

It turns out that role was no longer available and when Glasson finally found a role that was open by September 2018, five months before she was set to go on maternity leave, she faced a whole new round of discrimination, the former employee said. 

Her new boss, and that boss’s manager, asked that Glasson remain in a support role, not managerial, in the new gig before she went on maternity leave so she wouldn’t “rock the boat” and cause problems for the unit, which was new and still forming, Glasson said.

Still, she was introduced to her team members as a manager but then told privately by her boss that she shouldn’t “do anything that’s management related,” Glasson said. 

By December, Glasson was having serious complications with her pregnancy as she was diagnosed with “complete placenta previa” — a condition she described as “serious and unpredictable” that could easily prove fatal. So she went to her bosses to let them know. 

“Hey, I’ve been diagnosed with a complete placenta previa. I can’t travel because I have to stay close to a specific hospital,” Glasson told her boss. 

That’s when her boss “started making inappropriate comments” and “discrediting” Glasson’s situation, the former employee said. 

“In one meeting, she [basically said], ‘I just listened to an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bed rest, and when I was pregnant, I bled a little bit and my doctor put me on bed rest. I ignored what my doctor said, and I actually gave one of the biggest presentations of my career the day before I delivered my son via C-section. And by the way—we’re not really certain that there will actually be a management role available for you upon returning from maternity leave,’” the boss allegedly said, according to Glasson. 

At this point, Glasson hired an attorney who sent a demand letter to Google asking them to help her transfer teams and obtain a role with similar responsibility, as well as conduct an investigation into her previous boss’s alleged retaliation and discriminatory comments. 

Google refused to comply with the demands, Glasson said, and instead tried to pay her to leave. The woman “declined to move forward” and soon went on maternity leave after she started having bleeds from her condition. 

“It was one of the worst, most emotional, scary experiences I’ve been through. And when I should have been focused on myself and my baby, I [was] reaching out to HR and saying, ‘This is very clear and blatant discrimination that I’m experiencing,’” Glasson said. 

Google finally investigated a piece of Glasson’s claims and ultimately found the boss who doubted her condition “wasn’t trying to discourage” her from listening to her doctors and “no policy violations were found,” Glasson said. 

They told her not to worry about retaliation, offered her counseling and sent her on her way,” Glasson said. 

By the time Glasson’s performance review was underway in May 2019, she’d been out of the office “the entire calendar year” and was told she “needs improvement,” which starts the process for potential termination at Google, Glasson explained. 

Instead of returning to Google in September at the end of her leave, she decided to quit, get a job with Facebook and publish the anonymous memo about what she experienced. 

She’s filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against Google, which is the first step toward pursuing a lawsuit alleging discrimination, Fast Company said.

Glasson’s been told that Google will “eat [her] alive” and to avoid a lawsuit at all costs, but she remains undeterred, the outlet reported, adding Google declined to comment on their article. 

“I have more resources to fight this than most people do. From what I’ve read, most people [facing pregnancy discrimination are] in situations where they’re leaving their homes. They’re having to make decisions because they lost their job,” Glasson told the outlet. 

“It was awful for me, certainly, but it gets even uglier for people who are not in the position that I’m in.”

Google couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.