(NewsNation) — Women on both a global and national scale are continually met with obstacles in the way of their careers, families and educational goals.

From business ventures to family planning and equal pay, women are subjected to hurdles their male counterparts are less likely to encounter.

Meaningful progress isn’t likely to happen overnight, but activists, researchers and government projects around the world are working to chip away at the inequities women and girls face.

Girls Who Invest

In low-income and conflict-ridden areas especially, entrepreneurship forges new paths for women to make and save money and gain economic power that would otherwise be unavailable to them.

Policies, institutional biases and social norms, however, can act as barriers separating women entrepreneurs from their goals. According to the nonprofit Girls Who Invest, about 145 trillion assets are expected to be under management by 2025, but only 1% of U.S. financial assets are managed by women or people from diverse backgrounds.

The organization works to encourage women investors by offering two tuition-free education programs to learn finance and investment fundamentals.

Each year, Girls Who Invest places more than 200 students in investing internships, and 70% remain in finance, according to the nonprofit’s website.

The intensive 11-week summer program and the self-directed online program are available to undergraduate students from any major who are enrolled in or transferring to a four-year college or university.

Step Up

Educating girls creates economic opportunities, better wages, reduced pregnancy and early marriage rates, improved child and maternal mortality, increased participation in politics and decreased climate risk vulnerability, according to the Brookings Institution.

The benefits impact more than just women, too. Helping girls finish high school can boost a country’s GDP by 10% by 2030, according to UNICEF USA. On a more individual level, an educated girl on average earns twice as much over a lifetime than her counterparts with no schooling.

The nonprofit Step Up offers mentorship programs, community connection, social-emotional skill building and career practice for high school-aged teens, young women and those who identify with womanhood and communities facing systemic barriers or first-generation students.

Among those teens who have participated in Step Up’s mentorship program, 83% reported feeling more confident. Another 82% say the program made them more self-aware, and 84% said felt more career-ready.

Foundation for Women’s Wellness

Investments in women’s health venture capital saw a 314% increase between 2018 and 2023, according to a recent Silicon Valley Bank report. Still, major gaps exist.

Throughout history, medical research has failed to consider how sex might impact the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, according to the American Hospital Association (AHA).

In nearly three-quarters of cases where a disease mostly affects one gender, “the funding pattern favors males,” according to the Foundation for Women’s Wellness (FWW).

FWW is a nonprofit public charity that supports research into health concerns such as female cancers, cardiovascular disease, hormone issues and important sex-specific differences in health and disease.

The organization also distributes fellowship awards to future physicians and scientists from diverse backgrounds.

FWW’s 2023 research awards went toward efforts to examine a potential new form of hormonal contraceptive for women, stroke and heart attack prevention and oxytocin response differences between sexes.  

A Better Balance

The discrepancy between how much money U.S. men and women earn has hardly budged over the course of 20 years, despite significant gains in the 80s.

In 2002, American women typically earned 80 cents for every dollar a man earned, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2022, marginal improvement had occurred, with women earning 82 cents for every dollar a man made.

A Better Balance is a nonprofit legal advocacy group supporting what they reference as family-work justice. The organization advocates for equal pay laws and policies like paid sick time, paid family and medical leave, fair scheduling and accessible child care and elder care.

Those needs aren’t exclusive to women, but motherhood and having minor children at home can coincide with a wage gap increase. Although employed mothers earn about the same as similarly educated women without children, both make less than fathers, according to the Pew Research Center.

To that end, A Better Balance has helped pass policies including paid family and medical leave programs in 14 states as well as paid sick time policies in 16 states.

In 2022, A Better Balance helped pass the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which strengthened legal protections for pregnant and postpartum workers throughout the country. It also played a role in passing the federal PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act.