✅ Inspiration The persistent gender and racial wage gaps in workplaces around the world inspired us to create EqualPayNow. Transparency is the first step toward equity, and we wanted to empower individuals to anonymously share their salary data and explore trends that reveal systemic inequalities. By aligning with the UN’s SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), we aimed to build a tool that drives data-backed conversations and policy changes.
✅ What it does EqualPayNow is a web platform where users can anonymously submit their salary details, including role, experience, education, location, gender, ethnicity, and industry. The platform aggregates this data and presents insights through interactive dashboards, including:
Average salary by gender, ethnicity, and industry
Gender pay gap visualizations
Top-paying roles and regions
A live salary lookup tool for exploring trends by job and location
✅ How I built it Frontend: Built with Next.js 14 and Tailwind CSS, using modern components for a responsive UI and smooth user experience. We used react-hook-form with Zod for robust form validation.
Backend: Node.js + Express server hosted on Render, connected to MongoDB Atlas for data storage. RESTful APIs power salary submission and analytical endpoints.
Visualization: Chart.js integrated with React for rendering dynamic bar charts based on real-time query results.
Security & Privacy: No emails, names, or personal identifiers are stored. All data is anonymous and aggregated.
✅ Challenges we ran into Ensuring anonymous data collection while maintaining accurate filtering and insights
Managing hydration mismatches in server/client rendering on Next.js
Structuring the backend logic to dynamically group by fields (gender, ethnicity, industry)
Making autocomplete UI (for job/location inputs) feel natural and responsive
✅ Accomplishments that we're proud of Fully functional end-to-end application with real-time salary insights
Clean UI with job/industry autocompletion, form steps, and progress indicators
Built a gender pay gap calculator and comparative dashboard in less than 48 hours
Seamlessly integrated backend APIs with real frontend usage
✅ What we learned How to build a scalable full-stack app quickly using Next.js + Express
Aggregation pipelines in MongoDB for dynamic insight generation
UX lessons around auto-suggestion inputs and filter feedback
Best practices in protecting user anonymity while collecting sensitive data
✅ What's next for EqualPayNow Add authentication so users can optionally track their own submissions
Introduce geographic heatmaps to show pay variation across countries/states
Enable CSV export and API access for researchers and journalists
Collaborate with advocacy NGOs to make use of the data for real-world policy influence
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