Fe.m

Empowering women to empower women, one click at a time.

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Inspiration

Fe.m was inspired by the concept of Stack Overflow. This popular discussion forum for coders to engage with and help other coders has become a space for many developers to solve their problems or help others to solve there's. Fe.m takes this concept and applies it to our everyday experiences as women. Especially as women in the STEM field, we have experienced the disadvantages first-hand of being female in this male-dominated industry. Rather than coders helping coders, Fe.m is a place for women to help other women to achieve their goals, answer their questions, etc. and receive the same assistance in return. We believe in the quote that "empowered women empower women" and Fe.m was created to cultivate that sense of strength in community.

What it does

Fe.m is a discussion-based community focused on empowering women to empower other women. Aptly named with the atomic symbol for iron, Fe, within the word “Fem” for female, Fe.m is all about creating a space for women to become the strongest version of themselves and encourages them to share that strength with others. With three topics for discussion, Opportunities, Questions, and Goals, Fe.m users are encouraged to communicate their experiences and dreams with others. Submitting a comment to any of these forums makes it visible to other users, allowing anyone to reply with their own answers, advice, potential opportunities, etc.. These answers can then be saved where they will appear on another page of the website for the user to keep as a reminder as they explore their chosen field, solve gender-related problems, or as simple motivation/inspiration. Fe.m is a place where this sense of motivation is shared across all users, becoming a community that makes role models and guidance available to those who need it so that they can become their own role models to others.

How We built it

We created Fe.m using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The illustrations on the page have all been personally drawn with the color scheme and purpose of the website in mind. The structure of the page was created in HTML, and styled with CSS. All of the discussion forums were created through JavaScript. Filling out a text area and clicking submit will add that comments text and corresponding date to the localStorage. It is then printed to the page using HTML.

Challenges We ran into

As juniors in high school with only intermediate level skills in HTML and CSS and little to no familiarity with JavaScript, this project was incredibly challenging for us in many ways. We were simultaneously teaching ourselves the concepts of JavaScript while attempting to add it to our website. Since the foundations of the site were based upon using the language to create forums, we struggled a lot with making the forums functional and had many bugs to work out along the way.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

Because we were so inexperienced with these languages, being able to create these functioning forums was a great achievement for us. Additionally, this is only our second Hackathon and still feels like an amazing accomplishment whenever we are able to create and submit these projects that result from so much hard work and patience.

What We learned

Most of our skills come from what we learn in computer science classes at school, and we rarely do projects of this magnitude. Applying our skills to such a big project with so many working parts was new for us, but we learned a lot about debugging, linking files together, and creating a multi-page website.

What's next for Fe.m

To advance Fe.m, we would allow the user to make an account to save all their data to. Additionally, we would add a direct messaging system so that women can connect on an individual level to talk about job or internship opportunities, or give individual tips and advice.

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