A high-profile engineer at Mailchimp accused the company of ‘sexism and bullying’ in resignation announcement

• Mailchimp engineer Kelly Ellis quit Wednesday after accusing the company of “sexism and bullying.”
• Ellis said in a Twitter thread that she resigned after a conversation about pay “went south.”
• Ellis is also involved in an ongoing gender pay bias lawsuit against her former employer, Google.
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Kelly Ellis, a principal software engineer at the email-marketing company Mailchimp, accused the company of gender discrimination and harassment in a series of tweets announcing her resignation Wednesday.

“Welp, I guess it’s official: I’m leaving my job. I dealt with sexism and bullying, and found out that I, as the only female principal [engineer], was paid less than the other (male) principals outside of Atlanta. I would not recommend friends work at Mailchimp, especially women,” Ellis tweeted.

“Honestly, this sucks, I really didn’t expect to quit today. A conversation about comp went really south. I’m an unhappy camper, but hopefully brighter things are on the horizon,” she added.

Ellis and Mailchimp did not respond to requests for comment.

Ellis has garnered a large following on social media and has frequently spoken publicly about gender and racial discrimination.

In 2017, she and other female engineers sued Google – where Ellis worked for more than four years, according to her LinkedIn profile – accusing the company of paying women less than men, and a court is currently deciding whether to grant the lawsuit class action status. (In a separate case, Google agreed this month to pay $2.6 million to workers to settle racial and gender bias claims brought by the US Department of Labor).

Ellis’s resignation follows a series of high-profile departures by women and people of color from tech firms including Google, Pinterest, and Coinbase over allegations of bias, discrimination, and harassment.

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