How we work · Our approach
We find what causes a disparity, and what to do about it.
Anyone can divide availability by utilization and report a number. Boston has the number, and five years of reform behind it. The City needs to know what moved, what did not, where in its own process each gap forms, and why.
The disparity index: a group's share of contract dollars (utilization) divided by its share of firms in the market (availability), scaled to 100, with values under 80 marking substantial underutilization. Boston already has a rigorous version of this number. BBC Research & Consulting's 2020 disparity study, final report February 2021, measured availability with a custom census of roughly 800 phone surveys and found combined MWBE availability of 16.9% against utilization of 11.0% for FY2015 through FY2019, an index of 65. The group detail is sharper: Black American-owned firms at 12, non-Hispanic white woman-owned at 76, Hispanic American-owned at 70, and Asian American-owned at 141, above parity. HSG has extended the surface read forward from the City's open data: the certified-MWBE share of discretionary spending rose from 5.2% in FY19 to 12.3% in FY25. Those computed figures count City- or state-certified firms only, so they are a floor on true MWBE participation, not a like-for-like update of BBC's certified-or-not measure.
It shows the size and direction of the gap between presence and participation, and it shows where to look first. Boston's baseline is stronger than most jurisdictions can claim, because BBC's availability rests on a primary-data custom census rather than a raw firm count, and the industry texture is already visible: an MWBE index of 34 in construction against 67 in other professional services, with Black American-owned firms showing substantial disparities across all work types. The post-study trend adds a second read: real, measurable movement in certified-MWBE spend share, from 5.2% to 12.3%, that still sits below BBC's 16.9% availability benchmark and well below the 25% goal the 2021 Executive Order set. The gain is concentrated in MBE spend, while WBE share has stayed nearly flat at roughly 2.4 to 3.0% for eight fiscal years. Together the index and the trend are a credible, transparent first read of where Boston stands.
Computing the ratio takes minutes, and Boston has already paid for the ratio done properly once. A study that re-runs the same surface arithmetic on fresh data and stops there tells the City what it mostly already knows: a gap existed in 2020, some measures were adopted, and the certified numbers moved. That is the standard update the large, established disparity-study firms typically deliver, and it is also the read a hostile expert can take apart in deposition, because it is a correlation with no theory of cause, no controls for capability, and no location in the procurement process. The update Boston actually needs is causal: what moved after the 2021 Executive Order and the Sheltered Market Program, what did not move, and why. We treat the ratio as the first step and build the causal and locational analysis behind it, so the City receives recommendations it can act on and defend.
Where we go
The ratio is the start, not the answer
Start with the simple measure. BBC's 2020 study put combined MWBE availability at 16.9% against utilization of 11.0% for FY2015 through FY2019, a disparity index of 65, with construction at 34 and Black American-owned firms at 12. The City responded: the February 2021 Executive Order set citywide goals of 25% MWBE (15% WBE, 10% MBE) of discretionary spending and required departmental equitable procurement plans, and in August 2022 the City adopted the Sheltered Market Program under M.G.L. c. 30B Section 18. HSG has computed the trend since from the City's own open data: certified-MWBE share of discretionary spending rose from 5.2% in FY19 to 12.3% in FY25, a floor on true participation because it counts certified firms only. We produced those figures from public data before any engagement, and they are on the portal with every number traceable to its source.
A ratio and a trend line tell you a gap existed and that it narrowed. They do not tell you what produced either fact, because a divided figure carries no information about cause. The deeper work traces the procurement funnel stage by stage, from vendor registration and certification to awareness of opportunities to bidding to the responsiveness and responsibility check to award to prompt payment to subcontract participation. We add a private-sector regression, a qualified-willing-and-able availability survey reconciled to BBC's 2020 baseline, the 16-barrier framework, and structured verified interviews. Where firms drop off in the funnel points to the kind of problem at work, and a supply problem, a selection problem, a payment problem, and a network problem each call for a different fix. Why MBE spend rose while WBE share stayed flat for eight years is exactly this kind of question, and we do not prejudge its answer.
Pinpointing the cause is what lets a recommendation be specific. Once the analysis shows which stage of the funnel the drop-off happens at, and which explanation holds up, the fix follows from it. A drop-off at registration or certification points to outreach and a simpler onboarding path across the City and Commonwealth SDO tracks. A drop-off at the bid stage points to how opportunities are advertised and how qualifications are written. A drop-off after award, in slow payment, points to the City's payment practices. Each fix attaches to a mechanism the City can change, and Boston already holds the levers: the departmental equitable procurement plans the 2021 Executive Order requires, the Sheltered Market Program, and its own certification pipeline. We build the recommendations race-neutral first, in the order the law and 49 C.F.R. 26.51 expect. Most of what closes these gaps is open to every firm and does not turn on the race or gender of its owner: unbundling large contracts, fixing payment timelines, broadening bid lists, and helping firms build the relationships that informal networks otherwise ration. The goal is more firms from every segment of the community competing for and winning City work.
The discipline that makes a finding credible
What a gap can and cannot tell you
A low disparity index does not prove the City did anything wrong, and we do not start from that assumption. A raw difference between availability and utilization is a correlation, and a correlation can have several sources, only some of which point back at the City. The cause may be something the City controls, such as how bid lists are built or how prequalification and bonding thresholds are set. It may be marketplace-wide, reaching across public and private buyers and rooted in access to capital or in the informal networks that decide who gets the first referral. It may be a legitimate, non-discriminatory difference in the firms themselves, in size, capacity, or the lines of work they are positioned to bid. Our job is to test those explanations against the evidence. We control for capability and qualifications, we examine whether the City's own criteria are appropriate and least restrictive, and we build the record to the strong-basis-in-evidence standard the Supreme Court set in Croson, under the heightened scrutiny the SFFA decision confirmed. The First Circuit has no modern disparity-study precedent as fully developed as some other circuits have produced, which makes a conservative, attack-tested record more valuable to Boston, not less. A finding that survives that scrutiny is one the City can stand behind. A benign explanation is just as useful to surface, because it shows where effort is not needed. We report whichever answer the evidence supports.
The ladder of analysis
From a gap to its cause
Each step answers a specific causal question and addresses a rival explanation, so the study can say not only that a gap exists but why, and where the City can act. The tag on each step marks whether the cause it isolates is something the City controls, a marketplace-wide condition, or a legitimate difference in capability.
PhD-led stratified custom-census survey of firms in a spend-derived market area, NAICS-weighted to City and Boston Public Schools expenditure, telephone plus email, to a 95% confidence interval and plus-or-minus 5% per industry subsector. Anchor willingness to active public-work registration and observed bid behavior. Because a firm must register to bid, the City's supplier registration rolls and the City and Commonwealth SDO certification directories define a bounded, followable universe of firms that have signaled willingness to do public work, the tractable government-contracting market the survey then measures readiness within, knowable in a way the open private economy is not. Following the Houston study and NCHRP 644, and consistent with Croson's qualified-willing-and-able standard, do not capacity-discount the denominator, since current capacity is itself partly a product of past conditions; the only ability filter is genuine market-area presence and line-of-business match. Reconcile the new census against the 2020 BBC availability database and appendices so change over time is measured on a consistent basis, and replace equal-weight ABS firm counts with this weighted denominator before recomputing any index.
Rules out the leading attack that the gap is an artifact of an inflated headcount denominator (counting firms that never bid or are out of line-of-business). If the gap persists against a willing-and-able, spend-weighted denominator, an availability-measurement explanation is ruled out.
Build a bid-level dataset of who requested documents, who submitted, and who won, by solicitation. Compute a bid-to-award ratio by ownership and compare it to the availability-to-award ratio. A gap that closes at the bid stage points to a supply or awareness problem upstream; a gap that opens at the bid stage points to a selection problem at evaluation. Pair with offer and lost-contract records where they exist so willingness rests on bid behavior rather than registration alone.
Separates the supply explanation (firms are not bidding) from the selection explanation (firms bid and are not selected). This decides which half of the funnel the rest of the analysis must concentrate on and rules one of the two out as the dominant channel.
Construct a stage-by-stage conversion funnel and compute the retention rate by ownership at each transition: registered share, certified share, opportunity-aware share, bidder share, responsive-and-responsible share, awardee share, paid-on-time share, and subcontract-participation share. Locate the stage with the largest ownership-specific drop. Each stage implicates a different cause and a different fix: a registration or awareness drop is a supply and outreach problem, a bid-to-responsive drop is a criteria problem (route to S5), a responsive-to-award drop is a selection or network problem (route to S6), and a payment drop is a cash-flow problem.
Locates causality in process space. It rules out a single global story by forcing the gap to a stage. A supply-stage drop rules out a selection bias claim; a payment-stage drop rules out an availability claim; a sub-stage drop points to prime behavior rather than City selection.
Estimate a contract-level (and firm-level) regression of award and dollars received on ownership while controlling for firm age, firm size (employees and receipts), prior relevant experience, owner education, capital and bonding capacity, contract scope and dollar size, procurement method, and industry cluster. The coefficient on ownership, net of those controls, is the residual gap. Report it with confidence intervals. A residual at or near zero means capability differences explain the raw gap; a significant residual means a portion is not explained by capability.
Rules in or out the legitimate-capability explanation. A raw index of 65, or 12 for Black American-owned firms, can reflect that diverse firms are younger, smaller, or less capitalized on average. If the gap vanishes under controls, the cause is capability and the remedy is capability-building, not preference. A surviving residual is the evidentiary core of a marketplace-discrimination finding.
Inventory and code every City and Boston Public Schools solicitation in the study period for each screen. For each criterion, estimate the share of the available minority-owned and women-owned pool versus the non-minority pool that could satisfy it, using the census firm-age, capital, bonding-capacity, and experience data, and apply a disparate-impact screen by ownership using the EEOC four-fifths convention as an analytic analogy (distinct from the disparity-index threshold of 80 on the 100 scale, which shares the four-fifths ratio by coincidence), flagged for significance. Run a fit-to-scope test (is a five-year or three-prior-contract floor necessary for routine work; is bonding calibrated to real payment risk; is a contract bundled past small-firm reach). Conclude with a least-restrictive-means review producing a keep, right-size, or replace recommendation per criterion, benchmarked to 49 C.F.R. 26.51 and the competition M.G.L. c. 30B is designed to secure. Apply the same audit to the City's own disparity-study solicitation (Event ID EV00017483) as a proof of concept. Augment the manual coding with an AI-assisted read of the full procurement-rules corpus that surfaces internal rule conflicts and candidate disparate-impact provisions for a named investigator and counsel to verify; the AI accelerates and broadens the review but makes no finding, and a responsible-AI advisor governs the bias-testing and documentation of that step.
Rules in or out the explanation that the City's neutral-looking requirements are themselves the barrier. A criterion that few minority-owned firms can meet, and that exceeds what the work requires, is a City-controllable cause distinct from any bidder behavior, and it grounds race-neutral remedies before any race-conscious measure is considered.
Operationalize Loury's contact-versus-contract distinction. Measure repeat-player concentration (share of dollars to firms with prior awards and Herfindahl-type concentration by ownership), the share of dollars flowing through sole-source, informal small-purchase, and referral or relationship channels versus open competition, and prime-sub pairing patterns (do the same primes pair with the same subs, and are minority-owned and women-owned firms locked out of those pairings or bound by exclusivity). Pair with the structured anecdotal protocol (S9) on old-boy-network and exclusivity themes. Compare ownership-specific gaps in informal channels against open-competition channels.
Rules in the social-capital channel as a cause and distinguishes it from formal-rule causes (S5) and from capability (S3). It supplies the theory of discrimination that a bare ratio lacks: if gaps concentrate in informal, relationship-driven channels and shrink in open competition, the durable barrier is network access, which both formal-criteria reform and capability-building miss.
Mirror the Houston Chapter 6 design. Estimate private-sector earnings and formation disparities for the Boston region: linear regressions on individual wages and on business-owner earnings, and logistic regressions on the probability of self-employment and business-formation rates, using PUMS microdata, controlling for race and gender, capital availability (homeownership, home value, mortgage status, unearned income), education, age and age-squared, marital status, English proficiency, disability, and market-area residence. Layer Census ABS and SBO private-sector revenue disparities by NAICS. A significant gap in the private-sector model establishes passive, marketplace-wide discrimination that the City did not create.
Distinguishes City-specific causation from marketplace-wide disadvantage. If the gap is large in the private economy too, part of the cause is passive societal discrimination outside the City's control, which under Croson can support the compelling interest while pointing remedies toward marketplace-facing tools. If the private-sector gap is small but the City gap is large, the cause is more local and City-controllable.
Add a dedicated access-to-credit sub-analysis. Estimate differences in loan denial rates, financing terms, startup capital, and reliance on personal and home equity by ownership, using HMDA, the Survey of Business Owners and ABS company-characteristics modules, Small Business Credit Survey data, and the homeownership and home-value capital proxies from the PUMS model (S7). Anchor to the Fairlie and Robb capital literature. Link capital constraints to firm size, bonding capacity, and the formation gap so the capital channel is explicit rather than folded into a generic capability control.
Rules in capital access as a specific, separable cause rather than an undifferentiated capability gap. It clarifies whether the right remedy is bonding assistance and capital access (a marketplace-facing, often race-neutral tool) versus selection or network reform, and it strengthens the marketplace-discrimination finding by tracing one of its mechanisms.
Run separately instrumented, structured interviews using distinct guides for businesses and for professional and trade organizations, recruited broadly (email, mail, personal contact, public hearings) to reduce self-selection. Code each account to the procurement-funnel stage (S4) and the barrier framework. Verify each owner account against the procurement record where possible (the bid was submitted, the payment was late, the criterion applied), and retain all transcripts. Report corroboration by theme: informal networks, bonding and insurance, slow payment, prime-sub exclusivity, and repeated demands to prove qualifications.
Courts applying Croson require statistical disparity be corroborated by significant anecdotal evidence, and the standard attack is that anecdotes are unverified or out of context. Verified, retained, stage-coded accounts rule out the noise explanation and tell whether the experiential signature matches the statistical location, while broad recruitment rules out a self-selected-complaint bias.
Apply a dual test to every group-by-cluster-by-category cell: disparity index at or below 80 on the 100 scale (substantial) and a t-test for statistical significance, with confidence intervals reported. Build the findings as a group-by-category matrix marking each cell disparity or no disparity and flagged for significance, rather than a single headline index. Report honest counter-results, including any group overutilized in a category, the way BBC's own results showed Asian American-owned firms above parity overall. Pre-register the methodology and apply the test uniformly so the study can return a null.
Rules out the noise explanation (a gap from small numbers or chance) and the over-inclusion problem (treating all minorities as one undifferentiated group). Croson condemned the laundry-list approach, and courts applying it have upheld remedies only for the groups the evidence supported. Significance plus group-by-category specificity is the binding constraint that decides which findings from every prior step are real and remediable.
What it takes
The data this analysis requires
The deeper analysis is only as good as its inputs. This is the full data picture, what we collect ourselves and what the City and Boston Public Schools would provide, so the work is concrete rather than aspirational.
| Dataset | Holder | Why it is needed | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
City prime contract and award records (master contract register) City provides | City of Boston Procurement Department and the City financial system of record (Auditing Department) | This is the actual utilization numerator. The portal's current figures come from the City's open contract-award and discretionary-spending datasets using the City's own certification flags, which count certified firms only and are therefore a floor on true MWBE participation. The internal line-item register lets HSG compute utilization certified or not, the way BBC did, at the group-by-category-by-contract-size level the dual test and the over-inclusion doctrine require, rather than a single headline number. It is the City's own marketplace, which Croson requires. | City financial-system contract and purchase-order records for the study period, ideally five or more fiscal years with line-item category coding, dollar value, award date, vendor name and ID, solicitation method, and department; the Analyze Boston Contract Award dataset (22,054 contracts of 10,000 dollars or more, FY19 through FY26 Q3) is the public counterpart HSG has already processed |
Boston Public Schools contract and award records City provides | Boston Public Schools procurement and finance functions | The school district is a large, distinct buyer (construction, instructional goods, services) whose category mix differs from general government, and remedies may differ by entity. The study must be able to attribute and analyze school and general-government spending separately and together, so that findings and fixes land on the entity whose process produced them. Without the BPS records the utilization base is incomplete and the findings matrix cannot be entity-specific. | BPS procurement and financial records, parallel to the City register: contracts, POs, award dates, dollar values, category coding, vendor IDs, for the same study period |
Subcontract participation and payment records (compliance system) City provides | City contract-compliance function under the Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion and the Supplier Diversity Program (and the BPS equivalent); compliance vendor system if one is in use | Disparity often concentrates at the subcontract level where minority and women firms are funneled, and the City's announced scope names subcontractor utilization explicitly, so a prime-only analysis understates the gap and misplaces causality. BBC found a subcontract index of 64 alongside the prime index of 65. Houston derived its RGMA from the full universe of expenditure data, prime and subcontract, and several of its remedies (forbid prime-sub exclusivity, IDIQ compliance, mandatory subcontractor-data entry) target this stage. If the City's subcontract data are thin, that is itself a documented finding the study reports and the City can act on. | Contract-compliance and subcontractor-monitoring records, plus subcontractor utilization plans and post-award subcontractor payment confirmations, for the study period |
Vendor payment and prompt-payment records (financial system) City provides | City of Boston Auditing Department and financial system; BPS finance | Slow or no payment is one of the most consistently reported barriers in disparity studies (Houston Chapter 7 among others) and a distinct funnel drop-off: a firm can win work and still be squeezed out by cash-flow strain that hits undercapitalized firms hardest. Payment-timing data lets HSG test whether payment lag differs by firm ownership and connects the funnel to the access-to-credit and capital-constraint finding rather than leaving payment as an anecdote. | Accounts-payable and financial-system records: invoice date, payment date, payment amount, vendor ID, contract reference, for prime and (where captured) subcontractor payments; the Analyze Boston discretionary-spending dataset (1,064,059 payment lines, FY19 through FY26 Q3) is the public counterpart HSG has already processed |
Full solicitation text corpus (for criterion coding) City provides | City of Boston Procurement Department (and BPS) solicitation archives and Supplier Portal postings | Causality is what HSG is selling, and a major City-controllable cause lives in the solicitation terms themselves. Coding solicitations for years-in-business floors, prior-similar-contract demands, reference counts, bonding thresholds, and contract bundling lets HSG quantify how often facially neutral criteria mechanically exclude later-entering diverse firms, and test those criteria against the open competition M.G.L. c. 30B is designed to secure. This is the criterion-appropriateness audit and the structural backbone of the funnel diagnosis. | Complete bid/RFP/IFB/RFQ documents for a representative sample of solicitations in the study period, including evaluation criteria, minimum qualifications, experience and reference requirements, bonding/insurance terms, contract size and bundling, and any set-aside or Sheltered Market language |
Bid, offer, and unsuccessful-bidder logs (bid tabulations) City provides | City of Boston Procurement Department (and BPS) solicitation files | This is the dataset that separates a supply problem from a selection problem, the core of pinpointing causality. If diverse firms register and are available but rarely bid, the cause is upstream (awareness, bundling, bonding). If they bid at expected rates but lose at award or are found non-responsive or non-responsible disproportionately, the cause is in evaluation and selection. Win-probability models on bid-level data estimate the marginal effect of meeting versus narrowly missing experience and reference requirements while controlling for price and technical score, isolating the screen's independent exclusionary effect (Houston/NCHRP 644 approach). | Bid tabulation sheets and offer logs for awarded solicitations: every firm that submitted, price/score, responsiveness and responsibility determination, and reason for non-award; plus plan-holder/interested-vendor lists where kept |
Vendor registration roll and certification rosters (City and Commonwealth SDO) City provides | City of Boston Procurement Department and Supplier Diversity Program (City certification); Massachusetts Supplier Diversity Office for Commonwealth certification | Registration is the first funnel stage: if diverse firms in the market are not registered, the cause is awareness and onboarding, not selection. The roll also seeds the custom availability survey sampling frame and lets HSG measure certification wait times and friction across the two certification paths, since the City runs its own MBE/WBE/SLBE/SBE certification and recognizes Commonwealth SDO certification in parallel, and the study should test how well that dual path works in practice. Certification rosters anchor the willing-and-able definition with firms that have already signaled intent to do public work, the registration anchor Houston used to defeat the availability-inflation attack. | City Supplier Portal vendor registration database; City of Boston MBE/WBE/SLBE/SBE certification files; Massachusetts Supplier Diversity Office (SDO) certification directory; with NAICS, ownership demographics, certification status, and registration and certification dates |
Custom availability survey (HSG-fielded) We collect or derive | House Strategies Group LLC (PhD-led survey team; fielded by HSG, not held by the City) | This is the single biggest upgrade over the portal's preliminary read, which uses equal-weight public ABS firm counts flagged as a limitation. A sampled, registration-anchored custom census measures willingness and market-area presence and deliberately declines to capacity-discount, on the ground, consistent with Croson's qualified-willing-and-able standard and NCHRP 644, that current capacity can itself be a product of past conditions. Reconciling it to BBC's roughly 800-survey 2020 census means the update measures change on a consistent basis rather than resetting the baseline. It directly answers La Noue's standard attack that studies inflate availability with firms that never bid or lack capacity. HSG fields it; the City does not hold it but should support outreach and provide the registration frame. | Stratified random survey of firms in the relevant geographic market area, NAICS-weighted to City and BPS spend, telephone plus email, to 95% confidence and roughly +/-5% margin of error per industry subsector; measures willing-and-able status without capacity-discounting (mirrors Houston Appendix D custom census and Appendix E vendor questionnaire) and reconciles to BBC's 2020 custom census for change-over-time comparison |
U.S. Census ABS / SBO firm-level business data We collect or derive | U.S. Census Bureau (public bulk files; HSG retrieves and derives) | ABS/SBO establishes the private-sector, economy-wide picture the City did not generate, which is what grounds passive marketplace discrimination independent of City conduct. It gives the availability cross-check and the firm-formation and receipts disparities for the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metro and the five counties BBC defined as the relevant market (Norfolk, Suffolk, Plymouth, Middlesex, Essex), figures the portal computes directly from the public bulk files with every number traceable. It is public, so it cannot be attacked as consultant-manufactured, and it answers the just-hired-someone-to-find-disparity critique. | Annual Business Survey Company Summary 2022 (AB2200CSA01) and 2017 (ABSCS2017); Survey of Business Owners (2012) for trend; nonemployer statistics; firm counts and receipts by owner sex, race, ethnicity, veteran status, NAICS, and geography |
ACS PUMS microdata (but-for regressions) We collect or derive | U.S. Census Bureau (public microdata; HSG retrieves and models) | PUMS is the legal armor. Linear regressions on wages and on business-owner earnings, and logistic regressions on probability of self-employment and business formation, show whether, holding human capital and capital-access controls constant, minority and women earners and owners still trail (Houston found wage earners about 39% behind, owner earnings about 18% behind, all significant at 95%). A gap that survives those controls points to the network and capital channels Loury describes, which is exactly the causality HSG promises. The controls also operationalize NCHRP 644's business-formation, ownership, and earnings models. | American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, multi-year, individual person and household records for the Boston-Cambridge-Newton MA-NH metro: wages, business-owner earnings, self-employment status, plus controls (race, sex, age and age-squared, education, English proficiency, disability, marital status, homeownership and home value, mortgage, unearned/residual income) |
Access-to-credit and capital-access data We collect or derive | Public sources (CFPB/FFIEC HMDA, Federal Reserve, SBA, academic literature); HSG compiles and analyzes | Capital constraint is a leading non-City, non-discriminatory-on-its-face explanation that the study must test rather than assume, and a major driver of why diverse firms enter later, smaller, and with thinner balance sheets (Fairlie & Robb: nearly half of Black families hold under 6,000 dollars in total wealth). Testing the capital channel both strengthens the marketplace finding and protects fairness: it locates part of the gap in economy-wide capital access rather than City fault, which is central to HSG's no-assumed-fault posture. | HMDA mortgage and home-equity data, Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey, Fairlie & Robb / Census CBO capital evidence, SBA lending data, and the capital-availability proxies embedded in the PUMS controls (homeownership, home value, unearned income) |
Anecdotal and interview record (qualitative corpus) We collect or derive | House Strategies Group LLC (designed by the academic bench, executed by the field team; HSG holds the corpus) | Courts applying Croson require that statistical disparity be corroborated by significant anecdotal evidence, and they have devalued unverified accounts, so the protocol must verify owner accounts (solicitation numbers, dates) and retain transcripts. This is the experiential signature of the funnel: owners describe whether they were stopped at registration, certification, awareness, bidding, selection, payment, or the network, which tells the study where causality lives and which remedies fit. BBC's 2020 study engaged 570-plus businesses and held seven neighborhood forums; the update refreshes that record with a verification step built for evidentiary use. It is also the human face of Loury's discrimination-in-contact thesis. | Structured in-depth interviews (separate guides for businesses and for professional/trade organizations, per Houston Appendices G and H), vendor questionnaire open-ended responses, public hearings and sworn testimony, and business-engagement sessions, recruited via email, postcard, personal contact, and association outreach; with a verification step and full transcript retention |
Relevant geographic and product market definitions (NAICS spend distribution) We collect or derive | Derived by HSG from City and BPS data (the underlying records are City-held; the derivation is HSG's) | Croson requires the market be the jurisdiction's own. BBC defined the relevant market as Norfolk, Suffolk, Plymouth, Middlesex, and Essex counties; the update re-derives the market from where City and BPS dollars actually go, the way Houston found nine counties holding 77.1 percent of dollars, and validates or revises the five-county definition rather than adopting it off the shelf. That defeats the gerrymandered-market attack and makes the availability denominator match what the City actually purchases. The portal's preliminary figures use the Boston metro and BBC's five counties as public-data proxies; the full study tightens this from the City's own spend distribution. | Derived from the City and BPS prime and subcontract spend records: the NAICS/product mix the City actually buys (Houston Appendix A) and the geographic distribution of where those dollars go (Houston Appendix B); used to set the RGMA and the product market rather than adopting either off the shelf |
Items tagged “City provides” are the contract, payment, solicitation, and bid records only the City and Boston Public Schools hold. Everything else we collect or derive from public sources and our own survey.
The payoff
From cause to action
Pinpointing the cause is what makes a recommendation targeted instead of blunt. Each cause the analysis can isolate maps to a specific fix and a specific City lever. We lead with race-neutral, opportunity-focused measures and reserve anything race-conscious for the narrow, significant, group-specific gaps that neutral fixes cannot close.
Drop-off concentrated at the vendor-registration and certification stage (ready firms never enter the City's Supplier Portal or either certification pipeline, so the supply of bid-eligible diverse firms is thin before any solicitation runs)
Run targeted registration drives with the regional minority and women business associations, pre-fill and simplify Supplier Portal onboarding, deepen the cross-recognition between City certification and Commonwealth SDO certification so one application clears both paths, and shorten certification turnaround so a willing firm can register and become bid-eligible in days rather than weeks
Certification streamlining between the City and the Commonwealth SDO, plus vendor-registration outreach
Race-neutralDrop-off at the awareness stage (registered diverse firms are in the pool but do not learn of relevant solicitations in time to respond, and bidder lists skew to incumbents)
Publish a rolling 12-to-18-month procurement forecast, push targeted notices to certified firms by NAICS, hold pre-bid sessions timed early enough to prepare a bid, and make forecasting and outreach obligations explicit in each department's equitable procurement plan
Outreach and advance forecasting through the departmental equitable procurement plans the 2021 Executive Order requires
Race-neutralExperience floors and prior-similar-project minimums in solicitations exceed what the scope actually requires, screening out capable firms at responsibility review before price is read
Audit and right-size past-performance language to the work, accept comparable, aggregated, or subcontractor experience and key-personnel experience in place of firm-level history, and document the justification for any threshold retained
Solicitation drafting and qualification-setting standards in the City's M.G.L. c. 30B procurements
Race-neutralDrop-off concentrated at the bidding stage for construction, where bonding capacity caps who can bid as a prime rather than firm capability
Stand up a City bonding-assistance track (fee buy-downs that remove surety cost from bid evaluation, threshold reductions on smaller jobs, and a referral partnership with the SBA Surety Bond Guarantee Program), available to all small firms that cannot bond the full contract
Bonding assistance and solicitation bond-threshold scaling
Race-neutralLarge bundled solicitations consolidate scopes that could be procured separately, confining smaller firms to subcontract roles and foreclosing the prime path
Unbundle where the consolidation is not operationally justified, break large buys into right-sized lots, and require a written bundling justification before aggregating requirements. Documented practice supports this: breaking large contracts into smaller, right-sized lots has been shown to raise small and minority- and women-owned participation with no quotas or set-asides
Unbundling and contract-structuring policy
Race-neutralAwards concentrated among repeat primes reached through informal referral and relationship-based selection (Loury's discrimination in contact, the social-capital channel rather than a formal rule)
Move informal opportunities onto the open record by advertising small-purchase and quote-based buys, rotating quote solicitations across the certified pool, and instituting a structured matchmaking program that introduces unaffiliated firms to primes and buyers
Anti-exclusivity quote rotation, open advertising of informal buys, and matchmaking
Race-neutralSlow or non-prompt payment strains cash flow so that diverse firms decline larger awards or cannot carry the gap between performance and payment
Enforce and tighten prompt-payment timelines, add progress-payment acceleration and mobilization advances on larger contracts, and require primes to flow prompt payment down to subcontractors with monitored compliance
Prompt-payment policy and progress-payment terms
Race-neutralSubcontract participation lags because good-faith-effort requirements are unmonitored, allowing bid shopping and after-award substitution of listed diverse subs
Require subcontractor listing at bid, verify good-faith effort, monitor actual sub payments against the plan, and bar post-award substitution without City approval
Subcontracting good-faith-effort enforcement and payment monitoring
Race-neutralRestrictive or proprietary specifications (brand-name calls, narrow product specs, or credential requirements) limit the field for reasons unrelated to performance
Convert proprietary specs to performance-based or or-equal language, scrutinize each restrictive criterion for necessity, and require justification for any single-source specification
Solicitation drafting and procurement-criteria appropriateness audit
Race-neutralThe binding constraint is upstream and marketplace-wide access to capital (firms are undercapitalized at formation and cannot finance working capital), a condition that reaches well beyond City contracting
Partner with regional CDFIs and community banks on working-capital and mobilization loan funds for small contractors, and pair the financing referral with the prompt-payment and progress-payment fixes that reduce the capital a contract demands; treat the capital gap as a shared-marketplace condition the City mitigates rather than one it caused
Capital-access partnerships plus prompt-payment and progress-payment terms
Race-neutralFirms cluster at the bottom contract-size band and never graduate to larger work because they cannot accumulate the past performance and bonding history larger awards require (a self-perpetuating capacity ceiling, not current incapacity)
Run a mentor-protege and graduated capacity-building track that pairs emerging firms with established primes, builds verifiable past performance on staged scopes, and steps firms up in contract size as they demonstrate readiness
Mentor-protege and graduation pathway in the race-neutral SLBE and SBE tracks
Race-neutralA measured gap traces to a legitimate non-discriminatory difference (for example, diverse firms in a category are concentrated in NAICS the City rarely buys, or differ systematically in firm size matched to the work), and the gap does not survive controls for those factors
Make no remedy on this finding, document the non-discriminatory explanation, and redirect effort to categories where a controlled gap remains; revisit if the marketplace composition shifts
None required; route engagement effort to general supplier-diversity outreach where the data warrants
Race-neutralFor a given group and category the preliminary index falls below 80 but the gap does not survive the dual test (it is not statistically significant once availability is restricted to qualified, willing, and able firms and controls are applied)
Record no disparity finding for that group-and-category cell, do not set a goal there, and route the firms into the race-neutral SLBE and SBE tracks rather than a group-specific measure
Race-neutral SLBE/SBE track; no goal-setting for that cell
Race-neutralAfter race-neutral measures are determined insufficient to close it, a statistically significant, group-and-category-specific disparity persists and is corroborated by verified anecdotal evidence of differential treatment that neutral measures cannot close
Set a narrowly tailored, group-and-category-specific participation goal scaled to the proven shortfall, calibrate Sheltered Market Program designations under M.G.L. c. 30B Section 18 to the same evidence, sunset both on a fixed review cycle, and retire them once parity holds; apply them only to the groups and categories the evidence supports
Group-specific goal-setting and Sheltered Market designation, time-limited and evidence-bounded
Race-conscious, if warrantedHow we keep it fair and defensible
The commitments that keep the analysis honest
A nuanced study introduces ways to overreach. These are the guardrails we build in from the start, several of them required by Croson and the strict-scrutiny standard that applies in Massachusetts as it does everywhere, so the work is fair to every firm and able to withstand the most skeptical review.
See it in the rest of the portal
The disparity index is the surface read. The barriers module is the catalog of causes this approach tests. The methodology page draws the line between what public data can show and what the full study adds.
Source: Approach framework generated 2026-07-28.