HIVE

Inspiration

Studies have shown that the STEM talent funnel loses women at all stages. In tech, female software developers make up only 8 percent of positions in this field. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-developer-gender (2020))

And while GitHub touts over 73 million developers shaping the future of software, less than 8 percent of Github users are female.

So why is that?

Challenges

First, unconscious bias manifests in assumptions like:

• There are no women working in STEM; and
• Only men are interested in these fields.

Women in STEM fields can also be stereotyped, and this can cause them to question their ability or not want to pursue these degrees or occupations.

Second, lack of representation means that young women have fewer role models and examples to follow and are less likely to visualize themselves in STEM in the future.

Third, lack of mentorship can lead to girls losing interest in STEM due to limited or no support, guidance, and encouragement.

To reframe the current narrative around women and girls as coders, we created Hive.

What it does

Hive is an online platform that enables girls and women to discover, inspire, and grow in computing through support and project-based mentorship.

We designed it to promote, highlight, and raise visibility of open-source Github projects girls and women create or are leading because we couldn't find an online medium that does this. Hive also helps facilitate collaborations in Github and enables coders to request for mentorship. More experienced coders can then use our platform to identify projects actively looking for mentorship and volunteer to help on their own timeline.

In demonstrating that there are active girls and women coding, leading coding efforts, and working to help other girls and women be more involved, we fight the sexism and stereotypes that girls may experience in these fields, help make coding a lot less intimidating, and create community and a cycle of giving back.

And by integrating with Github, we also encourage more female Github users. EmailJS is used to also help facilitate collaborating by "buzzing" coders to collaborate on their project through email. Hive can be used for hacktoberfest and open source day where so many girls and women are introduced to coding.

How we built it

We prototyped in Figma and built the project using Node, React, Express, HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a lot more time than we anticipated in the design thinking stage for how best to solve the diversity in STEM issue. One team member also dropped out without notifying the team .

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We challenged each other's ideas and came up with a project that we'd love to use and work on! And we were able to develop to our vision!

What we learned

We learned about Firebase, integrating with Github, and working with the Github API!

What's next for Hive

We want to integrate with Github more!

Built With

• axios
• css
• emailjs
• express.js
• firebase
• githubapi
• html
• javascript
• material-ui
• node.js
• react.js