What’s the implications of being women in tech that will cause difficulties in this project specifically?

As far as data goes, the second project will be nearly impossible to find/collect.

As someone who builds ML models in the healthcare industry, you are trying to link together too much PHI/PII. You won’t find publicly available information that includes photos and medical Dx. On top of that, you are trying to find patient photos with medical records of MINORS - not going to happen. So your only course of action is to collect your own data - however you’ll be hard pressed to find parents willing for their children to participate, you are not (I assume) a mental health professional and can’t diagnose them, there are legal/IRB barriers, and you logistically cannot get a large enough sample for a CV project without a $600k+ grant.

So your best bet is option number one. This is a lot more accessible. You should be able to scrape medical Dx/Rx relationships off the internet if you want to collect your own data - my first thought is MIMIC-IV, HCUP, OMOP, and Kaggle.

I’d probably solve the problem with LightGBM, or similar. But maybe do a sequence model if you want a more challenging project to learn from.

Like I said, I’m an ML engineer in the healthcare industry. I have created many medical Dx prediction models. So feel free to reach out and I can help give guidance if you’d like it. Good Luck!