Empower

Inspiration

While brainstorming for the codeathon, we realised that there are two problems that are often left unaddressed when gender equality is discussed.

The first problem is one that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg talked about at TEDWomen in 2010 - women often don't take proactive measures to empower themselves with the necessary skills to gain leadership.

The second problem is that part of the general population no longer believes in feminism because of a perceived bias against men.

Additionally, a simple Google search on gender equality yields 44,000,000 results, but neither of us could find a website gathering various resources on the topic together.

Therefore, our website aims to resolve some of these issues as explained below.

What it does

Empower aims to be the starting point for people to learn about issues related to gender equality and bias.

Content on the website is divided into several categories such as books and movies, videos and stories. Under each category, users will find links to content from all over the web that discuss these issues.

We hope that the content featured may help users gain a wider perspective on gender equality and the problems surrounding the topic, as well as find inspiration to make the first step to empower themselves.

We also hope that through some of the stories shared, both women and men will come to realise that men can also be the subject of abuse in various circumstances, and that these are issues we all have to work together on.

How we built it

The website is almost entirely built with HTML and CSS, focusing on simple design that works across all platforms with the help of bootstrap.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the design to respond to smaller windows is a challenge we are still working on. We had to do our own artwork for the website in order to avoid copyright infringement issues. Learning how to merge commits on Github took us a while. Being a small team has meant that we had to keep the scale of the project smaller than we'd have liked to, especially in terms of gathering and reviewing suitable content.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the first time either of us has done web programming, so the whole journey has been a learning process for us. Almost every little thing on the website means an hour or two spent figuring out how to make it work within the overall framework, and the satisfaction that comes when the cards on the front page finally adjust properly to different screen sizes is a special feeling!

What we learned

How to collaborate on a project through Github, using Bootstrap and finding solutions to our problems through various online forums. We've also learned about many things that we did not (or have not yet) use(d) for our website such as parallax scrolling, content management systems and various fundraising websites.

We could list more but we've been learning everything from scratch! We are really grateful that we had this opportunity to push ourselves out of our comfort zones to learn these skills, and we will definitely be using them in our future projects.

What's next for Empower

We are hoping to gather a larger team to help with content management, perhaps moving to a CMS and figuring out a way to crowdsource content while still maintaining a high quality.

We also need to work on fundraising to sustain the project in the long term. Currently, we are still unable to afford a domain name for the website.

We are also working on partnerships with other networks and movements who can benefit and contribute to the website as well.