codhersgram

Codhersgram: where women networking = women empowering

Inspiration

Gender bias is pervasive in STEM fields. Women who embark on careers in technology often feel isolated, that they need to constantly prove themselves and have to struggle in this male-dominated industry. One of the major challenges that women in tech face are the lack of Workplace relationship and mentoring(finding mentors). Most of the girls want to have a female mentor and female co-workers because they can bond through similar interests, they prefer to have mentors of the same gender because they can understand the challenges we commonly face. Men do not face the same barriers, have the same family issues, and many a time simply do not want to mentor a woman

In my own college whenever there are any tech events, hardly there are 2-3 girls participating, hence we feel leftover and at times we are ignored. Now, what if we want to work with a girls-only team, want to share my problems, and want to get mentored by a girl senior sadly we can’t in such a case we have to either team up with boys or end up by not participating. Thus I and my team came up with a solution that can poise this ambiguity.

What it does

Women comprise 29% of the STEM workforce. Looking at such statistics and indifference, women may feel that it will be very difficult for them to compete in this tech industry. In fact, women are 22% more likely to experience “Imposter Syndrome” In the workplace(the overwhelming feeling of being out of place compared to colleagues) We want to bridge this gap thus we came up with a social media App named “Codhersgram” where women in STEM fields can connect to each other discuss projects, exchange ideas, share their problems, seek for collaboration to work on projects. Codhersgram has a feature of connection request where you can send friend requests to other fellow girls who are in the STEM fields, once they accept now you two are friends. Girls can now collaborate and form their own teams thus the issue of being leftover and ignored in a team of boys is now resolved. This will boost confidence in girls and they can fearlessly participate in various events and will feel comfortable in their workplace.

Women of all ages and stripes will be able to network themselves through our web application. Thus we can find our women role models and inspirations. This will motivate other girls to work harder and reach the pinnacle of success. You seek mentorship from your role models by directly getting connected to them, and since women always stand for women she will definitely help you as she knows the barriers women generally faces.

One of the coolest features of our web application is that you can share your projects, ideas, thoughts through posts, reels. It will appear in the feed of your connections. They can like and comment which will help you to get feedback.

How we built it

Figma: We used Figma to design our pages and layouts that we planned during the brainstorming phase. Front-end using React.js Backend using Node.js with MongoDB database on Google Cloud to store profile information of the user and then we integrated the backend API with the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we could not find teammates to work with, so we started working on the project a bit late, though with a great team effort and spending sleepless nights we could manage this till the end.

We had trouble routing between pages, integrating the backend with the frontend. However, we were able to overcome these issues and deploy our web application by the end with team efforts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Each and every member of our team are passionate about women in STEM. We wanted to deploy an application that could benefit the underrepresented group. We started with the idea of building “codhersgram”, then we did the prototyping, and it is an amazing experience like how we could draft and design our imagination. Finally in the end we could deploy the web application with help of our technical knowledge. We are proud that could build an application for social good that has the potential to solve real-world issues (i.e problems that generally women in STEM face).

What we learned

We could build and deploy the project at the end, we gained proficiency in building web applications with React.js, Node.js, and MongoDB. We learn to build user-friendly interfaces. It would not be wrong to mention that in addition to technical skills one of the most vital skills that we learned is teamwork, management, and handling pressure, and completing a task at a given deadline.

What's next for codhersgram

We want to add more functionality and flexibility to our web application. Integrating Machine learning models that can enhance the suggestion of the list of women who are like-minded and are willing to work in common fields. We would like to approach women tech leaders, volunteers who are passionate about women in STEM, and organizations for collaboration so that they can support and mentor women through our web application. We plan to add a chat server API.