Supplier diversity refers to the use of minority-owned businesses as suppliers, and a supplier diversity program is a proactive business program which encourages such use within an organisation's supply chain. Minority-owned includes black and minority ethnic business ownership, women owned, veteran owned, LGBT-owned , service disabled veteran owned, historically underutilized business, and Small Business Administration (SBA)-defined small business concerns. It is not directly correlated with supply chain diversification, although utilizing more vendors may enhance supply chain diversification. Supplier diversity programs recognize that sourcing products and services from previously under-used suppliers helps to sustain and progressively transform a company's supply chain, thus quantitatively reflecting the demographics of the community in which it operates by recording transactions with diverse suppliers. United States Paul D. Larson links the establishment of supplier diversity concerns to the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. Diverse- and women-owned business enterprises are among the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. economy. Diverse-owned businesses generated an estimated $495 billion in annual revenue in 1997 and employed nearly 4 million workers, while women-owned firms employed about 19 million people and generated $2.5 trillion in annual sales. Alongside the Women-Owned Small Business Program, the US Small Business Administration also operates an Economically Disadvantaged Women Owned Small Business (EDWOSBs) program for preferential award of federal contracts in certain industries. The Hackett Group, in their 2019 study of supplier diversity, found that US companies increasingly adopt supplier diversity programmes to achieve objectives associated with reputation management, their own corporate diversity culture and investment in their local communities, rather than reasons connected with legal compliance, and there are a growing number of companies who aim to extend supplier diversity within their tier 1 supply chain but also set expectations for tier 2 supply chain engagement activities to include supplier diversity language. Public contract bidding Certain states within the United States, as a part of their bidding process, incentivize Minority Business Enterprises (MBEs) and women-owned business enterprises (WBEs) to bid for publicly awarded construction or service contracts. They may also declare that a percentage of the work performed on a contract be awarded to an MBE or WBE. In New York State, a goal was set in 2014 for the award of public contracts to women and minority businesses to increase from 20% in 2014 to 30% by 2019. When the target was increased, the Association of General Contractors (AGC) sued the state for failing