Stacy Brown began working as an insurance agent for National Penn in 2002. In 2008, her department underwent a reorganization resulting in a change to her responsibilities (but not her compensation) and a move from a private to a shared office. Upset by those changes, Brown met with her manager, Maryanne Broemal, to ask why she was being moved without advance notice and to complain that the reorganization “was unfair.” At that meeting, Brown alleged, Broemal told her that National Penn believed its larger clients—who were shifted to a different group within Brown's department as part of the reorganization—would prefer to deal with a male agent. Broemal denied making that statement.

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Around the same time, Brown was growing dissatisfied with the work David Ferrier, a contractor and National Penn customer, had been performing on her house over the previous few years. After Ferrier unsuccessfully tried to rectify the problems with the work, Brown decided to file an insurance claim with National Penn. Before doing so, she asked Broemal whether she could “put a claim in” for the damage and whether doing so would “jeopardize [her] job.” She did not, however, tell Broemal that she intended to access Ferrier's confidential account information to file a claim on her own behalf without following normal procedures for filing claims. Accordingly, Broemal told Brown that filing the claim would not place her employment in jeopardy. After a similar conversation with another employee, Brown used National Penn's computer system to access and obtain Ferrier's information and file a claim for the damage to her house.