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The home screen for equalize
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The submit page that leads you to the wage report or incident report forms
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One of the graphs on the Statistics pag
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A collection of reports submitted to the website
Inspiration
We were inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing fight for equality. One part of this is advocating for pay equity — it is not uncommon for people belonging to visible minorities to be paid less than their colleagues even if equal work was done. We also took inspiration from raheem.ai, a site where people can report on, and share their experiences with, police conduct for our Incidents section. Having platforms like these, where people can share their own stories is immensely impactful and emphasizes the human element of the problems at hand.
What it does
With equalize, you can view statistics relating to the wage gap between people of different races, genders, ages, and areas of work. All of these statistics come from our database that you can contribute to by filling out a wage form. You can also read other people’s experiences with workplace discrimination in the Incidents page and submit your own account by filling out an incident report form. These features are all meant to highlight workplace discrimination and how much a person’s identity currently affects this.
Our goal with equalize is to educate people and make them aware of workplace discrimination. When more people recognize and understand why the wage gap and other forms of workplace discrimination exists, the support for pay equity will be so much stronger.
How we built it
We built the website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the Glitch platform to allow for easy web editing. After finalizing our idea, we split up the work and either started working on the front-end or on creating and using the Firebase Realtime Database. We eventually joint forces to be able to take information from the database, manipulate it and display it on the website.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into some challenges when it came to using the database since none of us have past experience with this. Our issue was that our code was not retrieving information from the database properly due to oversights in branching. Once we watched a bunch of tutorials, we realized where our mistake was and fixed it. We also ran into some trouble while trying to show a non-randomized key to save incident reports to but we were able to fix that as well after researching.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that we were able to create a product that can help educate and provide information about racial inequalities and pay equity. This hackathon has shown us that we can make a difference using the tech tools at our fingertips. We are also proud of how much we learnt since we started into this project with not a lot of prior knowledge on back-end development.
What we learned
Our biggest learning curve was using the database. There were many times during the development of the website where we had to put our collective brains together to figure out what was going wrong with the database. Nevertheless, we always found a solution to the errors so we are very proud of what we learnt.
We also learnt so much more about the injustices that Black communities, and other minority groups, face in their daily lives. All of this research just made us more invested into our project and in the fight for pay equity.
What's next for equalize
We would like the continue working on this project since we believe that this can be a useful tool for people to start understanding the problem with workplace discrimination. One of the first features we would like to implement is a discussion feature, where people can interact and share their stories. This kind of open dialogue between people is so important since it helps in the understanding of other people’s lived experiences. We would also like to expand our language and currency options to create a more accessible and global website.
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