The monthly jobs report from the Labor Department serves at least two purposes. It’s a timely macroeconomic indicator, which helps us figure out how the economy is doing, and how close it is to operating at full capacity. This is the aspect that most policymakers and commentators, myself included, usually focus on. But the jobs report also provides a wealth of information about how different populations are doing—serving as what might be called a distributional indicator. Given the increasing attention to inequality in our public debates, it is surprising that this aspect of the jobs report doesn’t receive more attention each month.

From a macroeconomic perspective, the March jobs report, which was released on Friday morning, wasn’t very thrilling. The headline payrolls number, which found a hundred and ninety-two thousand new jobs, was in line with expectations, and confirms what we already knew: the economy is expanding at a moderate pace, and it’s starting to shake off the impact of a harsh winter. Some online instapundits argued that the recent warm weather should have produced greater job growth and declared this a weak report, but that’s a dubious argument. The reference period for the survey of firms that produces the payroll number is the week that includes the twelfth of the month. In this case, that was the week of March 9th to 15th, when much of the country was still freezing.

So, rather than trying to further parse the payroll numbers, let’s look, for once, at the distributional data in the report, which shows that a great deal of variation and inequity are persisting, despite the over-all improvement. The recovery has been real for some groups, particularly those with college educations and whites who aren’t trapped in extended spells of unemployment. But, for other groups, including the long-term unemployed, African-Americans, and young adults who aren’t in college, finding work remains a formidable challenge, and finding a decent job is even harder.

In March, the unemployment rate was 6.7 per cent, unchanged from February. (How can the jobless rate remain the same when more jobs are being created? The work force is growing.) While 6.7 per cent is a high rate of joblessness by historic standards, it’s down from ten per cent at the depths of the Great Recession, and it’s not very far above the 5.5 per cent rate that the Federal Reserve regards as the lowest one consistent with stable inflation over the long run.

But, one problem with the 6.7 per cent number is that it’s an over-all figure, which doesn’t tell us much about how individual groups are doing. To find out more, we have to look at the detailed tables from the monthly survey of about sixty thousand households, which the Bureau of the Census carries out for the Labor Department. These tables break down the jobless figures in a number of ways, including by age, sex, race, and level of educational attainment.

The last of these factors matters a great deal. Among adults twenty-five and older who have a bachelor’s degree, which probably means most of you reading this article, the unemployment rate is just 3.4 per cent, about half the over-all rate. Despite all the talk about how the Great Recession affected college graduates—which it did—their unemployment rate never went above five per cent. At the other end of the educational spectrum, things were very different. For adults twenty-five and older without a high-school diploma, the jobless rate hit 15.6 per cent in 2010. Last month, it stood at 9.6 per cent.

The variation between racial groups is equally stark. Among white men aged twenty and over, the unemployment rate is now 5.3 per cent. For African-American men over twenty, it is 12.1 per cent. The gap between white and black females is also very large. According to the employment report, 5.3 per cent of white women aged twenty and over are out of work—the same as the rate for white men—but eleven per cent of black women in the same age group are jobless. Hispanics also have substantially higher rates of unemployment than whites, but the differences aren’t as large. Among Hispanic men aged twenty and over, the jobless rate in March was 6.9 per cent. Among Hispanic women aged twenty and over, the rate was 8.4 per cent.

Another group with strikingly elevated rates of joblessness is teenagers between the ages of sixteen and nineteen who aren’t in school or college. In March, about one in five of them, or 20.9 per cent, were out of work. That’s down from 23.3 per cent a year ago. But it’s still a very high figure, and, among minority teenagers, it’s even higher.

Many of these differences are longstanding, and that may be why they don’t receive much attention. But they shouldn’t be forgotten, especially when we are thinking about inequality. Periods of high unemployment are a scourge for everybody, but minority groups and the less educated are hit particularly hard. And, even when the economy recovers, they tend to lag behind.

Finally, we shouldn’t ignore the long-term jobless of all ages and races, who have been out of work for more than six months. I wrote about these unfortunates last month, and their situation isn’t getting better. According to the March report, they still number 3.7 million. Congress, scandalously, continues to deprive many of them of a means of financial support. The Senate, controlled by the Democrats, is poised to pass a bill restoring extended unemployment benefits, which lapsed at the end of December, but Republicans in the House seem certain to sink the measure without even taking a vote.

Illustration by Marc Rosenthal.