Inspiration
We're four women in computer science and engineering who are determined to combat gender inequality in the field. From both personal experience and empirical evidence, we identified a lack of strong mentorship networks as a driving cause behind gender disparities in nearly all fields in which women are underrepresented. While current organizations exist to combat this trend, we wanted to create a platform where anyone could sign up to mentor or be mentored, and people could form more personal, proximate relationships with one another.
What it does
We created fempower, a website that allows anyone to sign up for mentorship services and connect to mentors through Zoho Cliq. Our algorithm pairs mentors and mentees by career field and interest, allowing people to connect to those they have specific commonalities with, while also enabling an explore function that lets interested mentees discover new fields in their industry.
How we built it
JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Google Maps API for location pairing, Zoho Cliq API for chat integration. We hosted it on Amazon Web Services, with domain names from domain.com and .techspace.
Challenges we ran into
This was all of our first time basically doing anything with web development!!!! We had to pick up JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in just the time it took to code this website. Also, none of us had any experience with anything back-end, so we had to figure out a way to store all the data from the HTML form entries in order for our matching algorithm to work. Shoutout to Awake Chocolate for making this possible.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're alive!
What we learned
This is hard. But really worth it.
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