Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows around 5.3 per cent of women lost their jobs due to COVID-19 compared to 3.9 per cent of men, and women's hours of work fell by 11.5 per cent compared to 7.5 per cent for men.

For Wagga businesswomen, lockdown has been both a challenge and an opportunity.

Owner of LPL Studio Sommer Deaves was ineligible for JobKeeper when she had to shut down, but decided to look for the "silver lining."

"I actually kind of saw COVID as a blessing in disguise, as much as it was really hard not having money coming in I was able to think about the ways I wanted my business to go," she said.

Through lockdown Ms Deaves created The Wellness Co, a collaborative space for multiple local businesses to set up shop under one roof after lockdown.

"So many people are going to be impacted by this, I want to create a place where we can all go and open up ... rather than just me, so it's more affordable for them," she said.

Ms Deaves worked on the new project while also selling lash education courses and customised strip lashes online, while also parenting four children aged 3-10 alongside her husband while he continued full-time study.

"It was definitely chaotic, trying to do it ... we used a lot of technology!"

She said through her network she had seen how Wagga businesses had begun to adapt to a "city mentality" and embrace the online world through the pandemic to keep afloat.

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For Wagga Business Chamber president, HR consultancy owner and hotel and restaurant part-owner Danielle Wait, lockdown life looked a little closer to normal as she had already been working from home.

However, while her two-year-old daughter could not be at care or with grandparents, Ms Wait needed to balance parenting and work in new ways.

"it's just meant we've sort of been doing those things concurrently ... I've definitely seen that with both men and women in my experience," she said.

Ms Wait said she believed coronavirus had "humanised" workers as the commitments they had before lockdown become more obvious to their employers and employees.

"I hope it has shed a bit of light on how tricky it is to balance those two things and how you can actually do that, you can have a meaningful career and make a meaningful contribution to your community as well as raising a family," she said.

Ms Wait said she had been hearing anecdotally that many Wagga businesses were unlikely to return to the standard five days a week in the office, instead adopting more flexible models.

"I also think it provides a bit of an opportunity for us as a regional centre to be promoting Wagga as a place to work," she said.

"It's really showing our metropolitan counterparts that living and working in a country town is actually no barrier to being able to continue to either work in the city or find meaningful employment here."