The U.S. economy experienced another month of strong employment gains between mid-February and mid-March, adding 431,000 new jobs. According to the most recent Employment Situation Summary released this morning by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall unemployment rate is now nearly at its pre-pandemic rate of 3.5 percent, falling from 3.8 percent in February to 3.6 percent in March. The share of 25- to 54-year-olds with a job—a statistic known as the “prime-age employment-to-population ratio”—climbed from 79.5 percent to 80 percent, and is now less than a percentage point below its February 2020 level.
These aggregate U.S. labor market statistics reveal that, by some measures, several groups of workers have now fully bounced back from the coronavirus recession in 2020 and are benefiting from a tight labor market. At 5.2 percent, the jobless rate for workers without a high school diploma is well-below its pre-pandemic rate. There also were more than 500,000 more men employed in March 2022 than in February 2020, at the start of the coronavirus-induced recession.
But other workers have yet to recover. With employment still below its pre-pandemic levels, the jobs recovery has been slower for women in general and for Black women in particular. The unadjusted unemployment rate for American Indian and Alaskan Native workers is at 6.8 percent—a statistic we use here because the BLS does not currently publish this group of workers’ jobless rate on a seasonally adjusted basis—while the adjusted rate for Black workers is at 6.3 percent, putting the jobless rates of these groups at about 3.5 percentage points and 3 percentage points above the jobless rate of White workers.
