Know Your Company

Submission for TechTogether 2019

Project Overview

Know Your Company is a chrome extension that displays information about the company whose website you are on. Specifically, the pop-up window will return two pie charts for gender and ethnic diversity, as well as recent controversial news related to the employer.

This project was built by Raphaelle Tseng (@raphaelletseng), Miya Keilin (@miyakeilin), Su Goh (@gohsu), and Cheng Lin (@cclin130) at TechTogether Boston 2019.

We used data provided by Information Is Beautiful.

Inspiration

Many companies today remain extremely lacking in a diverse workforce. Despite studies indicating that 'Successful startups have more women in senior positions than unsuccessful ones', there is still much to be done to bridge gaps and reduce inequality in these areas.

We chose to build a tool that makes this data more transparent and accessible, both to inform job-seekers and to encourage companies to be more self-aware. We believe that organizations can be held accountable for their diversity efforts simply by publicizing the results (or lack thereof) of said efforts. Furthermore, an organization's employee makeup is an important consideration for job-seekers, especially those belonging to minority groups. We hope this will be a resource for underrepresented individuals to make more informed career decisions.

Example

Alt text

Tech Stack

The extension was written in JavaScript and HTML. We used d3pie.js to make the pie charts and Microsoft Azure's Bing News search API to collect the top news articles related to companies.

Challenges

Accessibility to data was an issue we struggled with as many companies do not to release numbers related to their workforce's diversity. In fact, only 3% of the 2017 Fortune 500 companies were fully transparent with their demographics.

We also faced issues trying to figure out how to do web development in JavaScript without using node.js. We initially used node.js modules such as plotly, dataframe-js, require (for calling APIs), but quickly learnt we had to solve all our problems in pure JavaScript.

Future work

In the future, we would like to improve our extension by increasing the size of the data available, as well as switching from a local to an online database to store it all.

In addition, the extension works on sites like www.google.com but struggles with careers.google.com. We would like to solve this issue and make the extension better at identifying companies from URLs.

Lastly, we would like to improve our key search words to ensure we get more specific news articles related to company news and information.

Built With

Submitted to

TechTogether Boston 2019
- Winner Gender Equality Hack
- Winner Spark! Inclusion in Tech Hack

Created by

I worked on tailoring the Extensionizr boilerplate to the specific functions of our chrome extension and the functions that extract the domain name from the URL and then cut it down to get the name of a company. I also created the icon.

miyakeilin
I worked on retrieving relevant company demographics given the website's domain name and displaying the values as two pie charts. I also helped integrate all of the HTML and Javascript functions into one extension.

Cheng Lin
I created the UI of the extension popup. I also worked on making pie charts for companies we did not have data for, and helped with the news search API call.

Su Goh
I worked on using javascript to call to Microsoft Azure's Bing news search API and display the top 3 results related to a specific query with HTML on the extension popup.

Raphaelle Tseng
Maths and CS @ McGill University

Updates

Raphaelle Tseng started this project — Mar 23, 2019 06:15 PM EDT

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