The March jobs report was the first good month for Black women in a while

• In March, more Black women were actively looking for work or working, and fewer were unemployed.
• It's a good sign, as Black women have largely been left out of the economic recovery.

Black women have been trailing behind in America's economic recovery, but March showed a welcome improvement.

In March, more Black women entered the labor force — meaning they were working or actively looking for work — and fewer were unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly data release on employment. In months past, one measure or the other has fallen behind. In February, unemployment rose for Black women, and fewer were looking for work.

"I think overall the story is that we are seeing continued progress in the labor market help expand opportunities to workers who might have been traditionally overlooked or underserved by the job market," Daniel Zhao, a senior economist and data scientist at Glassdoor, told Insider.

The unemployment rate for Black women aged 20 and over declined from 6.1% to 5.5% in March. Additionally, the unemployment rate for Black men dropped from 6.4% to 5.6%.

The labor force participation rate for Black women ticked up from 61.7% to 61.8%, meaning a net total of about 32,000 Black women entered the labor force in March.

"After the Great Recession, it took a long time for Black women's labor force participation to climb back up," Dr. William Spriggs, the chief economist of the AFL-CIO and economics professor at Howard University, told Insider. "Fortunately, we're not waiting years in this case."

However, the participation rate dropped for Black men, as 149,000 Black men exited the labor force in March.

"The Black unemployment rate went down with these kind of mixed things going on, but for Black women was all in the right direction," Spriggs said.

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh told Insider it was "great" to see the participation rate for Black women go up in this report.

When President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, Walsh said, he talked about "making sure that communities that have been marginalized or left behind, quite honestly, in the past" would not be left behind this time.

"I think some of what we're seeing is the president's laying down the foundation there," Walsh said.

Of course, that's not to say that systemic racism in hiring and wages doesn't exist. Black women are still more likely to be unemployed than their white female counterparts, whose unemployment rate fell to 2.8% as labor force participation went up. And white men aged 20 and over still have much higher labor force participation and an unemployment rate of 3.1%.

The National Women's Law Center calculates that if the 167,000 Black women who have left the labor force since February 2020 were included in today's numbers, the Black women unemployment rate would be a whopping 7.0%.

Spriggs said that unemployment and labor force participation for Black women "was all in the right direction."

But moves by the Federal Reserve to fight inflation and cool the red-hot labor market could threaten those gains. "This is the great fear with what the Fed is doing, because we aren't" at pre-pandemic levels yet, Spriggs said, "but we're moving in that direction."

"With all the uncertainty in the world, I'd rather be back to where I was before I start saying, oh, this is going really well, let's do something different," Spriggs said. "I think the numbers for Black women show that yes, women are coming back. We need to stop this idea that they aren't going to come back."