Premise
Developed as part of industry-experience capstone unit requirements, we iteratively built a web applications
addressing assigned UN Sustainable Development Goal in multiethnic, multidisciplinary teams over 8 weeks.
My team was assigned Goal 5 - "to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls".
The project was run in an Agile environment where we followed scrum practices with regular stand-ups, sprint plannings, sprint reviews, product demonstrations and retrospectives.
Industry-trained teaching assistants and technical mentors from Bunnings Australia acted as business analysts, project-directors, or stakeholders throughout the simulated work-experience program.
The problem
Based on market research and news articles, gender pay gap seemed to have remained an issue in Australia, with women in full-time work earning 13.3% less on average than men (WGEA, 2021).
Additionally, unequal representation across industries suggested limited opportunities for women in leadership, impeding overall economic growth and social progress.
How could we encourage fair and inclusive work environments while maximising the potential of all workers regardless of their gender?
Targeted users
- Working women with technical backgrounds facing career progression difficulties
- HR professionals looking for additional tools to assist female employees
- New mothers returning to work
Root causes identified
1) Information ambiguity and confusing statistics on income trends or the extant of inequalities.
2) Insufficient guidance on career planning and exploration.
3) Traditional childcare activities affecting the productivity of female employees. *
*(The goal was not to challenge traditions or family cultures per se but how to help the target audiences in spite of them since it was not our place)
Limitations
- Dataset scope and availability - constrained to working with only open/public data.
- Solutions MUST be data-driven and/or involve the use of data. Functions like forums and review systems were also not allowed.
- Team consisted of all males, tackling an issue faced by women, causing potential oversights (mitigated by consulting females for advice and comments)
Proposed solutions
- Interactive dashboards for income trends displaying earning patterns over the last 5 years.
(Featuring sector, state, & gender specific insights, visualised and calculated pay gaps, current year predictions, and TLDR interpretations)
- Interactive dashboards for presenting workforce distribution patterns and statistics across states and industries.
- Smart career exploration recommendation models where users are given job suggestions, based on self-descriptions responses, which they can then use to explore their lateral career growth.
- Career pathway guides and self-development course recommendations for the users' given careers (focused on ICT careers due to data and scope limitations).
- Childcare locators displaying childcare centres nearest to the users' workplaces enroute from their homes, and useful information like opening hours and official ratings.
Product
A website developed using the Django framework hosted via Digital Ocean and using their PostgreSQL Relational Database.
Product Video
Note: Website is no longer active/deployed.