A woman wearing a face mask walks past the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., the United States, Aug. 31, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

 In September, about 865,000 women dropped out of the US workforce, compared to 216,000 men, while the US market added 661,000 jobs in all between August and September, The USA Today reported Monday, quoting the latest jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"The nation's first female recession deepened in September: More women left the labor force than the total number of jobs the country added last month," said the paper.

The figure captures the enduring challenges faced by women who make up the majority of the workforce in fields that have been hardest hit by social distancing and COVID-19, particularly retail and hospitality, and the ongoing dissolution of the child care industry that has left many working mothers without options, according to the report.

A student is informed by a crossing guard of the temporary closure of the public school PS 139 in the Ditmas Park neighborhood in Brooklyn of New York, the United States, on Oct. 8, 2020. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

 
"September and the start of school added another ingredient to that bitter cocktail," it said.

One in four women are considering downsizing their careers or leaving the workforce as a result of the damage wrought by COVID-19. It's the first time in six years of research that the annual study has found evidence of women intending to leave their jobs at higher rates than men, said a report published by Lean In that studied 317 companies and more than 40,000 employees.

The results show that "the suspicions many of us had, that coronavirus was leading to very serious burnout for women, were more than true," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer and founder of the Lean In Foundation, was quoted as saying.

According to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, the US coronavirus death toll reached 214,793 as of Monday noon, and the number of confirmed cases was more than 7.76 million.