Nina is Malaysian. She married Brian, an American, while living in the US. There, they had a daughter together, Julia. A couple of years later, the couple decided to move back to Nina’s home state of Johor in Malaysia.

Under the country’s law, Malaysian women who give birth abroad do not automatically have the right to confer their citizenship to their children. Nor can they confer citizenship to a foreign husband. So Nina had to apply for citizenship for her daughter once the family returned to Malaysia, while hoping Brian could secure a work visa.

It was not an easy process. Brian and Julia were only allowed to stay in Malaysia on social visit passes, which had to be renewed every six months – for a fee. Public schools refused to enrol Julia because she wasn’t a Malaysian citizen. Brian didn’t have the required legal status to get a job, so Nina was forced to find work four hours away in the capital, Kuala Lumpur. The family was split apart, and Nina and Brian separated.

Julia’s application for citizenship was caught in a massive web of bureaucracy. It was rejected, then lost, then resubmitted. Finally, after numerous delays, requests and interviews, Nina was able to obtain citizenship for her daughter. Three years had passed since they moved to Malaysia.

Had Nina been a father, Julia’s Malaysian citizenship would have been automatic.

“Malaysian mothers can apply for citizenship for their children – it’s just that the approval process usually takes many years, with no guarantee that their children may be given Malaysian citizenship,” says Honey Tan, a Malaysian family lawyer who deals with discrimination cases. “The point is that they should not have to apply – it should be as of right that mothers may pass on citizenship rights to their children, wherever they are born.”

Nina’s struggle is not unique: women in more than 50 countries – about a quarter of the world – face sexist nationality and citizenship laws, according to rights group Equality Now.

Women can be prevented from passing on their citizenship to their children or foreign spouse, or forbidden from obtaining, changing or keeping their nationality. In many cases, they and their children are denied equal access to education, employment and health services. Some are even rendered stateless.

It is mainly African and Middle Eastern countries that practise such discrimination, but a large number are in the Asia-Pacific region. Campaign groups say significant progress has been made over the past two years, when Equality Now launched its campaign to amend discriminatory laws. A new working group to end discrimination in law and practice, as well as a target to end discriminatory laws in the sustainable development goals, has prompted the UN to try to get countries to meet international obligations to end discrimination against women.

As a result, some countries have either removed or taken action to change discriminatory elements in their laws, among them Austria, Denmark, Jordan, Vanuatu, Senegal, Suriname, Niger and the Bahamas.

There has been definitive improvement in Africa, where a new protocol on the right to nationality will be negotiated at the African Union, says Equality Now’s Antonia Kirkland, who led the organisation’s latest report on discriminatory laws. While that could help promote gender equality in more than half the states that still have discriminatory laws, the rate of change in many countries has been very slow or non-existent, says Kirkland.

“We’re definitely encouraged by countries like Jordan and Lebanon, which have started to put in interim measures – that’s the first step. But with some countries the political context is complicated. Some don’t have any – or very few – women members of parliament, or maybe they are at war. Yet most of the countries in the report have ratified Cedaw [the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women] and should be complying with that: there is very specific language in there about giving women equal rights and allowing women the right to transfer citizenship.”

Malaysia ratified Cedaw in 1995, yet has consistently failed to amend its federal constitution in line with recommendations on gender equality, says Tan. According to the Women’s Aid Organisation, which fights for gender equality, Malaysia is already home to more than 32,000 stateless children – a number that could increase, says Tan, as more Malaysians marry foreigners.

In neighbouring Singapore, obscure citizenship and residency laws have forced foreign women out of the country along with their Singaporean children because their spouses no longer sponsor their immigration passes, says Jolene Tan of the rights group Aware.

“Non-national spouses tend to get only temporary passes, which must be periodically reviewed by their spouses, and the criteria and timeline for transitioning to permanent residence or citizenship are wholly opaque,” says Aware’s Tan. “With about a third of marriages involving one citizen and one non-national, and with many of the disadvantaged non-national spouses being low-income women, this is a major women’s rights issue.”

For women like Nina, and activists like Honey Tan, the glacial pace at which Malaysia has sought to end discrimination shows how little respect women are still given in society.

“The government does not value their citizens equally,” says Honey Tan. “Men are still valued more than women.”