The COVID-19 pandemic is like a Russian nesting doll of crises. Open one, and there is another inside.

The public health emergency produced a painful economic recession. That economic crisis in turn first exposed, and then worsened, the economy’s systemic racial and gender inequities. Eventually, those inequities led to 2.5 million women leaving the workforce, transforming the deep recession into a “shecession.” Decades of progress for women evaporated in 12 months.