Earlier this year, to stay focused on its own sustainable development goals, Facebook announced Project 17, an initiative that takes a partnership approach to driving progress on the global goals, starting with gender equality. “To tackle the problem of gender inequality, you need to understand it,” said Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook. “For too long there has simply been too little data available.” The report’s authors further said they hope their work can start to fill in the blanks.
The two Facebook reports aim to shed light on the ways COVID-19 has revealed gender inequality and the economic impact to inform where help is needed and action can be taken.
The first report looks at a survey on gender inequality at home, in partnership with the World Bank Group, U.N. Women, Ladysmith and EqualMeasures2030. The survey had 460,000 respondents on Facebook in more than 200 countries and territories. The second report, Facebook’s fourth Global State of Small Business, looks at proprietary data collection in collaboration with the OECD and the World Bank and surveys 25,000 small and medium-sized businesses across more than 50 countries.
“The pandemic has hit small businesses hard — but it has hit female-run businesses and business owners

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