SHEQUAL - a community of women, for women, by a woman

Built with the ultimate goal of increasing the percentage of women in STEM workforces, SHEqual is a tool built to connect women with each other and with opportunities that are great fits for them.

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Inspiration

As the name plays at, this project aims at creating equal STEM opportunities for women. The vision is to increase the percentage of women in STEM workforces by bridging the gap between women and opportunities that are a correct fit for them. As a woman, I've always taken inspiration from women around me, and I wanted to create a community that truly helps my fellow community members tap their true potential someday. I understand the importance of connecting with those in your field, of taking up online courses, etc. and have made the tool to incorporate some of these functionalities.

What it does

As of now the features provided in this tool are:

  1. Getting job recommendations according to your skill set
  2. Getting information on job postings in your area
  3. Checking for eligibility by matching your work experience against the work experience required for the job posting
  4. Matching you with women of similar interests
  5. Getting insights from data about most popular jobs, highest-paying jobs, most in-demand skills etc.

How I built it

pyTigerGraph was used to establish connection, and set up the schema. Using pyTigerGraph, the vertices were imported as Pandas DataFrames and the rest of the code worked with them. This project is in it's very early stages and a fully functional web application is yet to be created. Some of the initial work on front-end has been shared in my GitHub repo. The login/sign up form was created using html and CSS.

Challenges I ran into

  1. The datasets required were not readily available and I had to extensively pre-process, clean, and fabricate datasets so that they could be mapped to the graph
  2. Since I'm completely new to Graph DB, getting a hang of the concept took a while
  3. I had trouble finding documentation for TG, with respect to connecting it with other popular software through APIs
  4. Lastly, since I could only start my project towards the very end of the hackathon, I didn't find enough time to create a fully functioning demo for the tool.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Firstly, I'm proud to be working on this project as I get to make a real change in the world with advancing technologies. Secondly, I'm proud of how far I've come in terms of expanding my knowledge of Graph Databases. Lastly, I'm proud of how well I was able to pre-process the messy datasets that were available and tailor them according to the needs of the graph.

What I learned

I was completely new to Graph Databases, and got to learn a lot!

What's next for SHEQUAL - a community of women, for women, by a woman

SHEQUAL has a very long way to go ahead. In the future, I hope to incorporate a personalized chatbot assistant that helps the user with personalized recommendations, and will use the ML workbench for this. SHEqual will also have a notification feature and a messaging feature with which you can directly message fellow members of the community. The tool will also bring into the picture events happening near your location that match your interests. Lastly, a tonne of work is left on both the backend and frontend, and a real time connection to the DB is yet to be established.

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