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Wall Street snapped its losing streak on Friday after a surprisingly good reading on the American job market refocused investor attention to the brightening outlook for economic growth.

The S&P 500 gained 2 percent, more than reversing Thursday’s 1.3 percent tumble and leading the benchmark to a slight weekly gain after two consecutive weeks in the red.

The rise came after new data showed that the pace of hiring picked up in the United States in February, when the economy created 379,000 new jobs, well above forecasts of 198,000. Parts of the economy that were hard-hit by the Covid crisis — such as leisure and hospitality — bounced back during the month.

On the other hand, the report also contained indications that parts of the economy remain troubled. For instance, the broadest measure of unemployment remained unchanged at 11.1 percent.

“The U.S. labor market is beginning to heal,” economists from Bank of American wrote in a client note on Friday. “However, the preponderance of labor market indicators suggest there is still work to be done.”

Such a situation — with the economy growing but not going gangbusters — seemed to be just want the market wanted see.

Industries tied to the short-term outlook for economic improvement led Friday’s gains. Energy stocks were the top-performing part of the S&P 500, up about 3.8 percent, after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries decided yesterday to keep a tight lid on supplies of crude oil. Prices for American crude oil climbed 3.8 percent to more than $66 a barrel.

Companies positioned to benefit from the Biden administration’s effort to boost spending fared well on Friday. Engineering and construction firm Granite Construction, which specializes in civil and transportation infrastructure projects, jumped about 4.5 percent. Another engineering, construction and maintenance firm, Dycom, jumped more than 7 percent.

The tone on Wall Street on Friday was distinctly different from recent weeks, when signs of growth, somewhat counter-intuitively, have been a source of consternation to the market.

That was largely because growth is sometimes accompanied by rising prices. And the Federal Reserve, which is responsible for keeping prices under control, has traditionally raised interest rates to cut off the chance that the economy broad-based price surge, known as inflation.

A recent rise in yields on Treasury bonds reflected growing expectations that the Fed could raise rates sooner than many had previously expected.

Low rates are a boon to the stock market. The Fed’s decision to cut rates to near zero in March 2020 was effectively the starting point for a stock market rally that has carried the S&P 500 up more than 70 percent.

But on Friday, bond yields showed only muted increases, rising to 1.56 percent. That was a relief to the stock market compared to Thursday, when public statements Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, seemed to set off another sharp rise in yields, which then hammered stocks.

In fact, corners of the market that can be most hurt by rising Treasury bond yields — which serve as the basis of borrowing costs for companies and households — did well on Friday.

Home-building stocks, for example, surged. Those companies have been hurt in recent weeks as the rise in Treasury bond yields also pushed mortgage rates higher. But on Friday large homebuilders such as Lennar and D.R. Horton posted their best single day rises since late January, rising 6.9 percent and 5.6 percent.

An airplane engine fan blade that broke during a United Airlines flight last month had thousands of flights remaining before it was due for a federally mandated inspection, the National Transportation Safety Board said on Friday.

The Pratt & Whitney engine containing that blade caught fire and shed debris over homes minutes after the plane departed Denver for Honolulu on Feb. 20. The pilots turned the plane around and returned to the Denver airport. The failure, similar to an incident in Japan in December and one on another United plane in 2018, forced regulators and airlines around the world to ground more than 120 Boeing 777 planes powered by that particular engine family, the PW4000-112.

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered immediate inspections of the fan blades in those engines. United, which has more than 50 such planes, was the only American airline affected by that order. The tests, known as “thermal acoustic inspections,” are conducted by Pratt & Whitney and involve bombarding the blades with pressure, which heats them, and then looking for temperature abnormalities that could point to internal cracks.

Early evidence suggests that one of the engine’s fan blades fractured during the flight last month and struck and broke another, according to the N.T.S.B., which is investigating the failures. That first blade had flown about 3,000 flights since Pratt & Whitney last subjected it to a thermal acoustic inspection, far short of the 6,500-flight threshold at which blades are regularly inspected using the technique.

That blade was last examined in 2016, and records from that inspection were reviewed in 2018 after the failure of another Pratt & Whitney engine on a Boeing 777 operated by United. After that incident, near Hawaii, Pratt & Whitney updated its inspection recommendations and said the blades should be tested more frequently, putting in place the 6,500-flight recommendation. The F.A.A. later made that interval mandatory. A Japan Airlines Boeing 777 powered by a Pratt & Whitney engine suffered a similar engine failure in Japan in December.

After last month’s failure on the United flight, Pratt & Whitney said it would recommend the inspections every 1,000 flights, according to the N.T.S.B.

Economic officials including Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen tend to cite a broader unemployment rate in addition to the Labor Department’s principal measure. And the alternative measure showed little improvement in the job market in February.

The figure remained at 9.5 percent, substantially higher than the official 6.2 percent jobless rate.

The adjusted figure adds back two groups of workers left out of the official number: people who have probably been laid off but who have been misclassified as employed, and workers who have dropped out of the labor market since early 2020.

Making those tweaks puts America’s jobless rate near its 2009 high and underscores that the job market is a long way from fully healing. The adjusted number for February was provided by Ernie Tedeschi, an economist with Evercore ISI, using a methodology that closely matches the one the Fed employs.

Officials have long looked at an array of data to gauge the job market — something Ms. Yellen championed while she was a top Fed official and eventually chair. But the pandemic recession has added urgency to that effort.

Millions of people dropped out of the labor market practically overnight at the onset of the crisis. They still aren’t applying for jobs, so they are not officially counted among the unemployed. But there’s little reason to believe they have no interest in coming back to work in the longer run.

As a result, there’s a huge “shadow” work force lingering on the labor markets sidelines. Policymakers are hoping they can pull many of those people back into jobs, shoring up the economy’s most important resource: its labor force.

The labor market gained 379,000 jobs in February, yet unemployment rates for Black workers rose, underlining the uneven damage the pandemic continued to inflict.

Unemployment among Black workers climbed to 9.9 percent from 9.2 percent in January. In contrast, joblessness for white workers ticked down to 5.6 percent from 5.7 percent in January, and those for workers who identify as either Hispanic or Asian also fell.

Unemployment among Black women over 20 rose to 8.9 percent from 8.5 percent the prior month, while the rate for Black men older than 20 increased to 10.2 percent from 9.4 percent.

The figures can bounce around from month to month, and severe weather across parts of the country may have affected the February data. Still, the picture that emerges is one in which Black workers are making halting progress toward recovering the major job losses they have suffered in the pandemic.

Black people hold 1.5 million fewer jobs than they did a year ago, down nearly 8 percent since the start of the pandemic. White workers, who make up a bigger share of the American population, have lost 6.3 million jobs — down 5 percent.

Economic downturns often have a severe impact on Black workers and hamper their efforts to regain employment afterward. African-Americans had been making strong labor market progress coming into the pandemic, a fact that Federal Reserve officials frequently cite when they talk about their desire to…