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Friday on Political Rewind: The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted\xa0and exacerbated\xa0existing inequities across\xa0society. One example is the severe economic and personal toll coronavirus has had on women \u2014 both at work and at home.\n\nData that has emerged during the COVID-19 crisis underlines a stark economic reality for women. Since the beginning of the economic shutdown last year, 2.1 million women have dropped out of the workforce in the United States.\xa0According to the National Women's\xa0Law\xa0Center, women accounted for 55% of U.S. jobs lost in the last year. That jeopardizes the economic and societal progress women have made, particularly in the working world, while the pay gap between men and women grows. These hardships are even more pronounced for women of color, who were already disadvantaged compared to their white counterparts long before the pandemic began.\n\nTaifa Smith Butler, president of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, said women entrepreneurs face unique challenges in the current economy and receive a disproportionate lack of support from efforts to aid small business.\n\n"We have\xa0seen entrepreneurs' doors close and\xa0not have access to capital or support with the payment protection programs," Butler said. "Looking at women entrepreneurs, will they be able to maintain and sustain their economic growth and their businesses through this pandemic?"\n\nSome experts say it could be\xa0years before women recover\xa0from the economic setbacks dealt by the virus.\xa0\n\nThese financial and professional\xa0hardships are in addition to the mental and emotional stress working mothers, and women overall, face while trying to balance family and home responsibilities with their jobs. Subha Barry, president of Working Mother Media, pointed to the concept of the "third shift," otherwise known as the "mental workload"\xa0of managing a household.\n\n"Long before this pandemic started, women were actually always working a third shift \u2014 and that is whether or not you had children," Barry said.\xa0"You still work the third shift. If you think of the first shift as work, second shift as home, the third shift was planning for everything \u2014 from the birthday parties to remembering to send out the gifts and cards, to organizing everything, to making sure there's, you know, the grocery lists are made even if somebody else did the grocery shopping. So there was a third shift already.\xa0Think about the added burden on top of that that has come in on women."\n\nPanelists:\n\nSubha Barry \u2014 President of Working Mother Media\n\nTaifa Smith Butler \u2014 President and CEO of Georgia Budget and Policy Institute\n\nRep. Teri Anulewicz \u2014 State Representative (D-Smyrna)