Leader50

To correct for inherent gender biases, Leader 50, an online mentorship platform, supplies aspiring young women (mentees) with the necessary structure to manage time and communication so they can:

(1) identify their personal/professional goals

(2) mutually connect with accomplished female leaders (mentors) who provide exposure/guidance to push boundaries.

Women from all socioeconomic backgrounds face a gender gap in economic participation as well as significant gender bias. Through our heuristic approach in the form of Leader 50, we hope to connect experienced women who have successfully maneuvered through this bias with aspiring youth who can directly benefit from that insider knowledge. By fostering a culture of women helping other women, connecting young women with the right guidance from the right people at the right time will equip them with the resources they need to overcome these existing gender biases to become leaders in their fields.

Through Leader 50, young women can access personalized mentorship through the internet and adopt a structured approach to the open-ended concept of mentorship. Upon creating a profile, mentors and mentees can specify their expectations, including future goals or notable accomplishments, time commitments, and the kind of guidance they are looking to provide/gain. Using an adapted algorithm, we will apply the “swipe right” feature to mutually match similar mentors and mentees. With suggested discussion questions, they can learn more about each other and set goals within the app itself to keep track of progress. To further incentivize and guide progress, a “Leadership Scoreboard” will award outstandingly productive mentor-mentees and create some fun competition!

We can affect global change by adapting Leader 50’s concept of connectivity and mentorship to transcend cultural barriers and address relevant biases that exist in different communities worldwide. By addressing such barriers in high income economies first, we hope to eventually increase women’s workforce participation in non-OECD countries, which will increase global economic growth and innovation potential.

Across high schools, the mediocre, non-personalized advising offered at most schools frustrates many aspiring female students. Despite the existence of resources, female students often experience difficulty in independently finding enriching opportunities, and the resulting lack of exposure hinders them from excelling in their fields. Successful female leaders who are willing and able to offer these resources lack an efficient platform to find mentees and often have difficulty efficiently accommodating mentees in their limited free time. By connecting leaders and students in a structured, personalized mentorship, we hope to narrow the gender gap by inspiring and exposing aspiring youth.

Through mutual matching of professional experience with capable talent, Leader 50 tackles one of the biggest obstacles to cultivating leaders worldwide.

By acknowledging mentors’ time limitations and mentees’ lack of knowledge on how to properly engage with their mentors, our solution focuses on helping each party with their respective challenges to effect change. The structured, organized approach to mentorship that our solution brings about will bridge the gap between leaders, aspiring youth, existing resources in a united “women helping women” culture.

Our solution’s primary outcomes are to directly revolutionize the mentorship dynamic in an affordable and accessible way. For aspiring female students, our solution introduces a structured process to guide mentor-mentee dynamic and improve their access to inspiring mentors. Additionally, our solution hopes to further enable mentors to effectively guide the next generation of leaders by offering an time-efficient platform for mentors to find mentees. By doing so, we can make woman-to-woman mentorship a more appealing, fulfilling experience for mentors and mentees alike. Through a web/mobile application, we hope to organize mentor-mentee engagement and maintain ease of access.

Track downloads and active users on app store. - Achieve a network of 1,000 female professional across well-developed countries combined with 8,000 prospective mentees within 2 years.

Surveys after mentee's and mentors have connected. - Achieve 90% cumulative match rate for all prospective mentees and facilitate significant career development opportunities provided by the mentors for 75% of mentees.

Track downloads on app store globally. - Establish domestic and international mentorships towards 90% of developing countries of all continents

Our solution is innovative because it attacks a social problem (gender bias/gap) through a technology-based social solution, rather than a technical one. By adapting this concept of connectivity and mentorship, our solution can transcend cultural barriers and address relevant biases that exist in unique communities worldwide. Through this novel mentorship platform, we are focused on simply directing the knowledge and experiences of leaders who have successfully dealt with these problems to those who could directly benefit from that guidance.

Successful leaders are defined as people who deeply care about a community/cause, which drives their professional and personal productivity. With that said, their time limitations make it difficult to accommodate mentees in their free time. Our solution capitalizes on the altruism of successful women and directs it towards aspiring young women who can benefit from it via a time-efficient, easily accessible platform.

During our initial pilot and growth phases, Leader 50 will be a free application in order to stay affordable and accessible for the high-income and upper middle-income countries that we are targeting, which tend to have access to internet-connected devices. As we scale globally and apply our solution to lower income communities (which often lack internet access) to address socially-relevant biases, we can partner with existing NGOs and nonprofit organizations to organize centers for women to access the application through internet-connected devices.

In our current prototyping phase, we have access to most resources necessary for the pilot and growth phases from our own networks and universities without any hindering financial burden. During this period, our research will include exploring sustainability models, particularly revenue sources such as:

(1) donations from pertinent professional organizations, corporate donations, and government grants,

(2) advertisement revenue,

(3) subscriptions review from schools and professional organizations.

In this direction, we aim to keep the service free for mentors and mentees. Once we have a steady revenue stream, we will be able to grow and scale.

Our solution’s success is contingent upon building a sustainable community of engaged mentors and mentees, finding efficient ways to communicate and introduce Leader 50 to young women globally, and delivering an intuitive user interface to keep mentors and mentees engaged and satisfied with their experiences.

Pursuing a male-dominated field is intimidating for many young girls. I was opposed to pursuing engineering, but after constant encouragement from mentors, I can honestly say that choosing engineering was the best decision of my life. Yet, not everyone has mentors. We are applying to Solve because we are passionate about giving aspiring girls everything they need to excel in any field they choose. The Solve community consists of many successful, inspirational women who have risen above gender biases. By partnering with the Solve community, we are motivated to utilize the necessary know-how to scale our pilot globally.

We are seeking out partnerships with WITI (Women in Technology International) and Fortune 500 companies as a source of mentors, high schools as a source of mentees, and Kristin Yim as our web/app development partner.