March 3 (Reuters) - The Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s section of a key U.S. central bank report on Wednesday for the first time flagged insights on the state of the U.S. economy from the perspectives of minority- and women-owned businesses, workers, and regular households. The change is part of a broader effort at the Fed to make sure it is tracking the economy in all its diverse complexity as it tries to steer the nation towards full and “inclusive” employment as well as price stability. The Federal Reserve publishes the Beige Book eight times a year, releasing it a couple weeks before its regular policy-setting meetings. It is a compendium of data and anecdotes gathered by each of the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks on current economic conditions, based on surveys of and interviews with key business contacts. In Wednesday’s Beige Book, the Minneapolis Fed added two new subsections - titled “Worker Experience” and “Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprises” - to its traditional litany covering the labor market, inflation and economic activity across key sectors, such as manufacturing, services and farming. “Despite increased job openings, labor supply constraints contributed to a continued disconnect between workers and opportunities,” the bank’s staff wrote at the top of its worker experience section. It went on to elaborate on the challenges many workers in the district face on the job or in their hunt for employment, touching on issues ranging from a rise in employers demanding 12-hour shifts to transportation hurdles for low-income workers. Last October Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari flagged the coming change, noting that businesses are overrepresented in the Beige Book data and promising to fix that, at least in his section of the report. The process began soon after. “Our data collection efforts have expanded to include more outreach to workers and women- and minority-owned enterprises,” Minneapolis Fed spokeswoman Alyssa Augustine said in January. In Wednesday’s Beige Book, the section on minority- and women-owned businesses highlighted that many business contacts in that category “noted hesitancy among immigrant business owners to apply for assistance out of concern for jeopardizing the immigration status of themselves or family members.” (Reporting by Ann Saphir and Dan Burns; Editing by Andrea Ricci)