Women-owned businesses in Canada are taking nearly twice the amount of time to recover financially from the impacts of COVID-19 than those owned by men, a new study revealed.

The Business Resiliency During COVID-19 study, published by FreshBooks, a small business accounting software company, showed this to be the case across all industries in Canada.

The study used business data from more than 10,000 small businesses in the US and Canada, with survey responses collected between July and September 2020.

It showed that it took Canadian women-owned businesses 10 weeks to start to recover, but only five weeks for men-owned businesses. What’s more is that even when the women-owned businesses started to recover, they were still finding success below their historical average‚ but the male businesses exceeded theirs soon after rebounding.

“Ultimately, once recovery started, it took businesses owned by men three weeks to get back to their historical average, while it took businesses owned by women 13 weeks,” according to FreshBooks.

To top it off, many studies surfaced throughout 2020 that showed that women were bearing the brunt of the impacts of the pandemic.

Women are more likely to take on unpaid work like child care, teaching, cooking, and cleaning, they tend to earn less, have fewer savings, and more often work in informal roles, according to UN Women.

Read the full article about women-owned businesses during the pandemic by Jackie Marchildon at Global Citizen.