Womento

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🌱 Inspiration

We ask the question: How might we use technology to create a supportive environment for woman-identifying high school students to encourage pursuit and interest in STEM careers?

The project is based on the global problem of barriers for females breaking into the STEM industry. Although the industry is rapidly growing, there is still a lack of female representation due to a lack of education, accessible opportunities, mentorship, and the presence of masculine stereotypes. Initially, our team’s thought process began from identifying these hindering factors that perpetuate the inequality experienced by women-identifying individuals, and through connecting them to our own experience, we realized that having a female representation and role models around us greatly influenced our pursuit for a career in engineering.

The design of our app was inspired by fostering positive mentor-mentee relationships through the creation of a mobile phone app as well as providing a resource outlet for women interested in pursuing careers in STEM. Therefore, our vision for this project is that it becomes a stepping stone for all women to succeed in their careers in STEM and promote gender diversity across the industry.

🌱 What it does

Womento is a mobile phone application that enables women-identifying high school and undergraduate students that are passionate about STEM fields to engage with mentors in various areas via direct chat functions, question-and-answer forms, and photo snapshots of the day in the life of a mentor.

Through the sign up and login pages, mentors and mentees are able to customize their profile in order to specify their field(s) of interest. Based on the mentee’s profile, they will be paired with a mentor in that field, and mentors are able to reach out to help mentees regarding academics, job hunting, and information for potential future careers. In addition, the Mentor’s Digest section on the home page enables mentors to post snapshots from their work day such that mentees are able to experience the “day in a life” of any given career. Womento also provides information related to STEM events near the user's location, including hackathons and informative conferences, to promote users’ engagement and involvement in STEM events.

Thus, through positive interactions with successful women in STEM, mentees can seek valuable guidance and learn from their mentor’s experiences. Our hope is that our app can aid underrepresented gender identities to foster a strong sense of community in the STEM world.

🌱 How we built it

We used Figma to design and prototype the features of our app. We created design features that best showcase our vision and represent the purposes of career guidance and mentorship. The overall colour scheme of pastel green was used to promote a sense of belonging and a fresh start in terms of career and professional prospects. For various illustrations, we used the website Doodle Ipsum to add to the uniform visual aspect of the app. As we continued to brainstorm and discuss ways to positively inspire females, we agreed that a visual representation of role models’ jobs is a great way to explore diverse career paths, which led to the implementation of the “Mentor’s Digest”. It’s an explore page for mentors to share their day in the life of their job. We also included the idea of a forum for people to get prompt answers for questions about their career and connect with like-minded individuals.

🌱 What's next for Womento

Going forward, we hope that Womento can be a platform where women-identifying students can freely connect with current workers in a positive manner in order to build lasting connections and motivate continued studies in STEM.

We plan to continue this project by creating a fully functional IOS mobile app using SWIFT. By connecting the app to a database, we will be able to track mentor and mentee accounts and information. We will also use location APIs (such as the Google Maps API) to sort events for different users by location. Lastly, we can create a backend algorithm to connect mentors with mentees based on common interests and careers paths.