Ashraf worked as a creative supervisor for Ogilvy & Mather, a global advertising firm that counts Unilever as one of its clients. She quit the firm in 2015, a few months before making the hit single "Kodaikanal Won't". O&M executive chairman Piyush Pandey said the firm had wanted Ashraf to stay on, but that she left to pursue a new career path in 2015.[4]
In 2008, she sang "Don't Work for Dow" while wearing a hijab to criticize Dow for its response to the Bhopal disaster in 1984.[5]
In July 2015, she released the single "Kodaikanal Won't" to protest the pollution of a river in Kodaikanal.[6] In the song she appeals to Unilever to help former workers in Kodaikanal, whose river was contaminated 14 years before with mercury from a thermometer plant owned by Unilever. Ashraf released a YouTube video of the song to campaign against the mercury poisoning. Ashraf used the Nicki Minaj tune "Anaconda" as the beat for "Kodaikanal Won't."[5][7] In 2015, she collaborated with Chennai-based singer Maalavika Manoj and Sapta on the song Deen. The song was written by Ashraf to combat moral policing and insist the faith must be a choice, not an imposition.[8]
Ashraf has recorded a song each in the Bollywood movie Jab Tak Hai Jaan and the Tamil movie Maryan (film), for music director A. R. Rahman,[9][10] and also for Santhosh Kumar in his Tamil film Inimey Ippadithan.[11]