WASHINGTON - WOMEN in the US may soon, for the first time, hold more jobs than men, if the economic crisis continues to eliminate jobs in male-dominated industries, experts say.

With the Labour Department announcing last Friday that 3.6 million jobs have been lost in the United States since late 2007, women have come within a hair's breadth of becoming the most active segment of the working population.

Women occupied 66,701 million jobs last December, out of the total 134,591 million, or about 49 per cent of the workforce, department spokesman Laura Kelter said.

As the real estate bubble burst, construction and manufacturing jobs were the first to be shed, both sectors that are more likely to employ men.

Last month, when manufacturing and construction lost 207,000 and 111,000 jobs, respectively, the health and private education sectors, which are dominated by women, created an average of 30,000 jobs each.

'Men have been hit much harder than women...Although women have lost jobs, men have lost many more,' economist Heather Boushey of the Centre for American Progress said.

'There are fewer men at work in the US today than there have ever been at any point in time,' she added, saying that only 69.2 per cent of men now have a job.

But the shift from men to women as breadwinners usually means less money for households. Dr Boushey noted that among full-time workers, women earn only 78 cents for every dollar a man makes.

'As women increasingly take on the role of breadwinner, ensuring that they get a fair wage is taking on more urgency than ever before,' she said.

She added that more women might feel the pain of the downturn soon.

'If we don't pass the economic recovery package, we may see a very large job loss among women as cities and local governments lay off workers who are disproportionately women,' Dr Boushey pointed out.