HerRights

HerRights empowers women with legal insights, HR guidance, mental health support, and helplines to navigate workplace rights and promote gender equality confidently.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for HerRights came from a personal experience that sparked a newfound awareness in me.

Recently, my department went through a restructuring, and I was unexpectedly demoted despite high scores in my Employee Development Dialogue. As an Asian woman in a Western workplace, I’ve often felt that I would hit a career ceiling sooner than others. Balancing work with family responsibilities, I found myself frequently saying "yes" and accepting outcomes, even if they felt unfair.

Then, one evening, my 5-year-old daughter asked me to read her a book about Rosa Parks. Reading her story and the words “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in” deeply moved me. For the first time, I felt compelled to stand up for myself and push back on this structural change. To my surprise, I succeeded, and in that moment, I felt the weight of countless concessions lift. Inspired by this experience, I knew I wanted to help other women find the confidence to speak up for themselves. HerRights was born from this vision, with a mission to provide women with the knowledge, tools, and resources to advocate for themselves and access support when facing challenges.

What it does

HerRights is an AI-powered tool designed to empower women in the workplace by providing clear, personalized information about their legal rights, psychology advise, and support resources. Users start by entering their country, age, and employment status, followed by key areas of focus related to workplace equality, rights, and support options. They can choose from four main services: Legal Rights Consultancy, Psychological Support, HR Consultancy, and Helpline & Support Resources. With this input, the HerRights Assistant—powered by Google Gemini—tailors responses to each individual’s location and personal context. Users also have the option to ask follow-up questions for even deeper guidance.

HerRights is built to maintain user privacy and discretion. Users can access resources anonymously.

How we built it

We focused on creating a platform that’s simple, secure, and highly personalized. Using React and Next.js for the front end allowed us to build an intuitive and dynamic user interface, while Firebase and Verce form the back end to provide secure data handling and authentication. Google Gemini powers the “HerRights Assistant,” leveraging its capabilities to ensure the assistant delivers accurate, consistent, and localized information that meets each user’s unique needs. From selecting options to asking specific questions, every step is designed to give users actionable insights based on their rights and resources available in their country and workplace.

Challenges we ran into

When I found out about this project, there were only 9 days left until the submission deadline, making time my greatest challenge. Developing and coding an app from scratch was completely new to me, and this steep learning curve was another hurdle. While I could understand some code, it had been a long time since I’d actually written any, so I turned to AI programming tools for help.

There were countless moments when, after finally building a piece of functionality, I’d request help from AI to implement another feature—only to find the entire program unexpectedly breaking. I’d spend hours troubleshooting without success, then have to start over from scratch. These setbacks taught me resilience and problem-solving skills.

GitHub became my lifesaver, thanks to my husband, who helped me set up my account and showed me how to use it for version control. Despite the obstacles, I managed to learn, adapt, and ultimately bring "HerRights" to life, knowing it could one day empower women to advocate for themselves confidently and without compromise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m proud of successfully creating a tool that can genuinely help women understand and assert their rights. Bringing HerRights to life with minimal technical experience is a huge accomplishment, especially given the time constraints and the technical challenges along the way. Each part of the tool, from the data handling to the AI assistant, represents hours of learning and problem-solving, and I’m proud that it all came together to make something meaningful.

What we learned

You might find this surprising, but although I studied C programming in college, I hadn’t written any formal code since graduation. I’ve always been interested in new technology, so after deciding to participate in this project, I immersed myself in online resources to learn how to create apps with AI. I taught myself every step: writing project requirements, choosing programming languages, building the front and back end, setting up hosting and data storage, calling APIs, testing locally, publishing an app, and even setting up my GitHub account specifically for this project. Every part of this journey was new to me, and each step was an opportunity to learn something valuable.

What's next for HerRights

With more time and resources, I plan to expand HerRights to offer even more robust support for women in the workplace. Future updates may include adding features like talk to AI assistant, rating and review for the companies, and partnerships with legal and mental health organizations for immediate assistance. Additionally, I’m considering adding options for users to save their chat history and create personalized accounts that they can easily access later. I hope HerRights will continue to grow as a trusted resource, helping women everywhere to feel empowered and informed about their rights in the workplace.

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