(Bloomberg) -- The Black jobless rate climbed sharply in March, with Black women seeing particularly large drops in employment and overall labor-force participation.

The overall unemployment rate for Black Americans rose to 6.4%, matching a high last reached in August 2022, from 5.6% in February, according to Labor Department data released Friday. The rate for Black women rose 1.1 percentage points to 5.9% as more of them left the workforce. 

Black women also saw payroll losses of 181,000, the biggest single month decline since April 2020, at the height of the pandemic lockdowns. The employment-to-population ratio, a broad measure of labor market health, dropped to 59.6% for these women after reaching a more than two-decade high last year.

It isn’t immediately clear why joblessness for these workers surged during a month that otherwise showed robust payroll gains and a drop in the overall unemployment rate, to 3.8%. Data by race and gender tend to be volatile and it may take another month or two to figure whether there’s meaningful deterioration of the job market for Black Americans — and why.

The three-month average, which smooths some of the volatility, rose to 5.8% from 5.4% for Black people.

“In historical business cycles, Black workers have been the last to be hired during the expansion and first fired during the contraction, so an increase in the Black unemployment rate is eye-catching to forecasters,” Comerica Bank said in a note.

The March figures put the Black unemployment rate at double that of Whites, which held steady at 3.4% in March.

“We’re keeping a very, very close eye on that and we’ll continue to work on closing that gap between Black-White unemployment,” Julie Su, acting US Labor Secretary, said on Bloomberg Television.

--With assistance from Mark Niquette and Jarrell Dillard.

(Adds comment from action labor secretary.)

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