Empower Her App Home Page
Confidence Quiz Question example
Confidence Quiz Feedback example
Interview practice - Initial question
Interview coach - Feedback on initial question response and second question
Interview practice - Answer to second question
Interview coach - Feedback on second question and third question
Resources Page
Motivation Page
Statistics Page
Progress Tracker Page
About Page

Project Story: Empower Her

About the Project

Our project was one of empowerment. So we named our app Empower Her. This app functions as both a confidence builder and a job coach. Women can use Empower Her to improve their interview skills. They can take the confidence quiz and get AI-driven conclusions and tips. Our aim is to help women become more confident during interviews so they can get better jobs that pay more. Our app aligns with UN SDG 5. We created it to promote economic empowerment and leadership for women and girls. We made it by leveraging the power of Google's AI.

Women earn, on average, 84 cents to every dollar men make, creating a lifetime earnings gap of $417,000.

We noticed that women often downplay their achievements. When someone is unsure of their value in the job market, they may not advocate for themselves. They might accept a lower salary. Over time, this widens the pay gap. Empower Her aims to provide women with skills and a place to practice. They can build their confidence through our online resources. They can use our tools and help bridge this gap.

Inspiration

Several factors contributed to the inspiration for this project. For Ashley, they stemmed from an event where a highly accomplished female programmer from a renowned tech firm discussed the job interview process. She explained that interviewers only know what candidates tell them and noted how men often tend to oversell themselves, while women do the opposite. This results in men sometimes appearing as stronger candidates simply because they project more confidence, even if they lack certain skills. Additionally, studies show that women are less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet nearly all listed qualifications, whereas men apply even if they meet just a portion of them. These insights highlighted the critical need to address the confidence gap for women in interviews.

Vino has spent much of her career helping women build confidence by offering mentorship both within her workplaces and among friends. She observed that many of her friends hesitated to apply for roles they were well-qualified for, especially if the position was in a new industry, or accepted lower wages due to self-doubt about their abilities and potential. Training women to rephrase their achievements and strengths could go a long way in boosting their success in interviewing and earning higher wages.

What We Learned

As part of research and building this app we learned a lot about:

Gender confidence gaps in job applications and interviews.
The role of confidence in career advancement and economic equality.
The power Gemini for simulating interview scenarios and providing real-time feedback.
The power of Gemma to effortlessly analyze quiz responses and provide customized feedback and recommendations.

How We Built It

We used a range of tools and technologies to create a two-module app focused on confidence-building and interview skills:

Quiz Module: This module assesses the user’s confidence level using a scenario-based quiz developed using Gemini chatbot. We designed the quiz to identify areas where confidence could be improved, with tailored feedback to help users recognize their strengths and areas for growth.
AI Interviewer Coach Module: This module uses Google’s Gemini API to simulate a job interview, tailored to the user’s current job type and the new role they are applying for. The AI interviewer provides realistic interview questions, responds to user answers, and provides more confident sample answers to help improve the user’s interviewing skills.

Challenges We Faced

Ensuring Realistic AI Feedback: One of the challenges was creating an AI interview coach that could provide feedback in a way that felt supportive and constructive. Tuning the AI prompt to respond accurately while maintaining a positive, empowering tone took some effort.

Technical challenges: We had planned to use Gemma provide customized feedback for each quiz answer and overall feedback and recommendations based on the user’s confidence level rating. While we were able to get the code working in the sample Google Colab notebook provided on the website, unfortunately, we were not able to get model authentication to work via Streamlit before running out of time. Please see the link and screenshot below for a sample of that work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We feel this tool really can help women become more confident in the interview process.
For both of us, there were elements of building this app that were challenging. Ashley is familiar with Streamlit but collaborating with another team member via Github was a learning experience. For Vino, product design and collaboration are familiar but Streamlit was a challenge to learn in a short time. For both of us, we had to quickly come up to speed on Gemini API, and using Gemma. We worked well collaboratively, rounding out each other's skills and have an app we both feel good about at the end of it. We got started late with this hackathon, so we are proud of everything we were able to achieve in a relatively short time.

What's next for Empower Her

Add speech-to-text functionality to the interview coach
Finish integrating Gemma into the quiz to provide customized feedback.
Build out more components towards developing women’s economic equity. Topics like banking, entrepreneurship, investing, long-term financial planning, etc.