leadHER

Leading females to Leadership

Comment

Inspiration

Social, educational, economic, political and psychological. These are the five types of female empowerment. From building relations with others to earning money to support themselves, women are rising among the world’s ranks and working towards building names for themselves. In order to thrive in our respective environments and build our skills, we need to take charge of these five parts. Take the initiative to network, take the responsibility for our wealth, and take control of our mindset. And to empower ourselves and enforce this, we need leadership. When we first started to research the topic of female empowerment in apps, we came across hundreds of results. A common theme among them was creating social platforms for women and helping them connect with others. Another was helping women track their health. Although these are important aspects, the applications could be defined as supporting, rather than empowering. We then turned towards the statistics. According to UN Women, 2.7 billion females in the world are legally restricted from having the same jobs as men. The gender wage gap is 23%. Nearly 40% of working women do not have access to social protection. We thought, how can we work towards a solution, bridge the gap between men and women in this world? How can we create something feasible to help the females of our generation and the generations to come? And so we made leadHER.

What it Does

To empower women around the world, we built an iOS application that uses a game-like simulation with real-life situations and provides educational resources to help women build their leadership skills and take on the world. The user first logs in and from there they have the option to navigate to three different tabs. The first tab is the simulation where questions will be given to users, allowing them to learn what to do in real-life scenarios involving tricky leadership situations. Then we have a videos tab that gives this app an educational touch. There are different topics that women can learn about, such as teamwork and careers, including videos for them to watch. Once a video is completed, a chatbot at the corner will pop up with messages for the user to answer, ensuring they thoroughly understand the material. Although this idea has not been fully implemented, the thought behind this is a decision tree algorithm where the different options the user selects would prompt different messages. The last major feature we have is a timeline about famous women in history. As the icons are clicked, information about the women's careers will pop up, along with their birth date and other facts. As time progresses, we aim to add more women to the timeline. With our app, we hope to inspire the female youth and adult populations to learn about leadership and the inspiring leaders of today.

How we built it

We built our app using Swift and Figma. We used google slides to create our pitch deck.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into included coming up with a unique idea and technical issues. Female empowerment is a large part of our society today, and we wanted to create something new that could be useful for women in their daily lives, not just when they need help. In addition, we ran into some technical issues as we are both self-taught coders and have just started app development within the last few months.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of our pitch and our code. We spent a lot of time thinking about the value of our product both to ourselves and our target audience. In addition, our code is much better than it was in our first hackathon and we are working towards adding better functionality for our projects.

What we learned

From attending workshops to brainstorming ideas to coding, we were learning during the entirety of the hackathon. We especially enjoyed the presentation on how to pitch our project and learned a lot just from building our project and doing research. Being a programmer seems to be really in the research!

What's next for leadHER

We hope to add more resources for young girls and women who want to develop their leadership skills using our application. We hope to add more outstanding women to our timeline and fully implement the chatbot feature that we have designed. By accomplishing these things, leadHER will be well on its way to becoming a vital resource for the world's female population. In the words of Sheryl Sandberg, “In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”

Built With

Share this project:

Updates