InvestHer

A website platform that bridges the gender wage gap and improves the financial literacy of women.

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Inspiration

We wanted to address three issues that women face related to their financial well-being.

  1. Gender Pay Gap-Even in the year 2024, women earn less than men despite being in similar roles and equally qualified. This occurs across all industries, leading to women being put at a wealth disadvantage.
  2. Lack of Financial Literacy-Women have been reported to have a lower financial literacy than men, with a gap in knowledge of personal finance. Similarly, this can also affect the wealth of women.
  3. Familial Responsibilities-Women have been reported to have a lower financial literacy than men, with a gap in knowledge of personal finance. Similarly, this can also affect the wealth of women.

What it does

We came up with three solutions that we wanted to implement to solve each issue:

  1. We want to call attention to the wage gap by making it more accessible for women to see the disparity between what they may be paid compared to their male counterparts.
  2. We also wanted to make it easier for women to learn of the many places they can invest their money in while also saving for retirement.
  3. We also wanted to help women with how much they spend on their families by giving guidance on how much should be spent on expenditures based on the size and total income of their households.

In order to achieve this, we came up with InvestHer. We offer three services an estimated salary calculator that allows our users to have an approximation of the pay that they deserve in the workplace, pay negotiation tactics that empower women to take charge in advocating for equal treatment in the wages they are paid by their companies, and a salary breakdown that ensure women have money saved for their futures.

How we built it

For the Estimated Salary Calculator, we created a machine-learning model using the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. We trained this model on a dataset consisting of male Amazon software engineers and their respective salaries. Using the user's position, years of experience, years at the company, and their location we are able to estimate what a similar male employee would make, allowing women to see the salaries that they deserve.

The Pay Negotiation Tactics service is implemented with the ChatGPT API so that we can give recommendations on how to negotiate to get closer to the estimated salary calculated.

The Salary Breakdown uses an algorithm that we created that takes in user inputs of a size of household, number in college, and total household income in order to approximate how much of their salaries should be spent on: -Necessary Expenditures -Leisure Expenditures -Retirement Savings -High-Yield Savings Accounts -Savings Accounts -Investments

Challenges we ran into

  • Finding a database that we could use to estimate the salaries. We ended up having to create our own dataset of 1,000 male Amazon software engineers instead due to sites having limited or outdated information and lacking APIs we could implement.
  • Training the machine learning model also proved to be difficult as more data would have proven useful since not all locations and sectors had enough employees for the user's inputs to be compared.
  • Connecting the front end to the back end was challenging as we had never done this before, making it hard to create our final website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Used React for the first time to create the front end of our website
  • Have a working model using the k-nearest neighbors algorithm which we trained based on our dataset

What we learned

  • How to connect the React front-end to the Python back-end using Flask
  • How to collaborate on a team using Git

What's next for InvestHer

Currently, our prototype is based on a dataset of 1,000 male software engineers working at Amazon. We would like to scale our model to be trained on a live database of employees of all companies and all positions in order to offer our users an increasingly accurate estimation of expected salaries. In the future, we would like to also add more in-depth negotiation tactics to aid the user in salary discussions. Additionally, we would like to have a more specific breakdown including a health savings account that women can invest their salaries into.

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