The State of Minority- and Women- Owned ... - Cleveland.com

Appendix A. Glossary
Appendix A. Glossary
ACS. The American Community Survey. The Census Bureau’s ACS is an ongoing survey
covering the same type of information collected in the decennial census. The ACS is sent to
approximately 3 million addresses annually, including housing units in all counties in the 50
states and the District of Columbia.
African American: Or “Black” refers to an individual having origins in any of the Black racial
groups of Africa.
Aggregation, aggregated: Refers to the practice of combining smaller groups into larger groups.
In the present context, this term is typically used in reference to the presentation of utilization,
availability, or related statistics according to industry. For example, statistics presented for the
“Construction” sector as a whole are more aggregated than separate statistics for “Building
Construction,” “Heavy Construction,” and Special Trades Construction” industries. See also
“Disaggregation, disaggregated.”
Anecdotal evidence: Qualitative data regarding business owners’ accounts of experiences with
disparate treatment and other barriers to business success.
Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander: Refers to an individual having origins in the Far East,
Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islanders (except Native Hawaiians).
Availability: A term of art in disparity studies that refers to the percentage of a given population
of businesses owned by one or more groups of interest. For example, Table A indicates that
M/WBE availability in Construction is between 17.01 and 17.20 percent (depending on whether
award dollar weights or paid dollar weights are used), indicating our estimate that between 17.01
and 17.20 percent of all the construction establishments in the City of Cleveland’s relevant
market area are owned by minorities or women. See also Utilization, Disparity Ratio.
Baseline Business Universe: The underlying population of business establishments that is used
in an availability analysis. It is used as the denominator in a M/WBE availability measure.
Black: Or “African American” refers to an individual having origins in any of the Black racial
groups of Africa.
Capacity: This term has no single definition. See Chapters II and IV for extended discussions of
this concept and its role in disparity studies.
Constitutional significance or substantive significance: An indication of how large or small a
given disparity is. Under the EEOC’s “four-fifths” rule, a disparity ratio is substantively
significant if it is 0.8 or less on a scale of 0 to 1 or 80 or less on a scale of 1 to 100.
Decennial: Refers to the census conducted every decade by the U.S. Census Bureau. The last
decennial census was conducted in 2010.
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