Recognising a supplier category does not by itself lead to purchasing

Disclosure. Just Gold, which funds and publishes Pride in Business, has been a Social Traders certified social enterprise since 2019. It has also worked with Social Traders as a client, including producing its digital awards and providing photography and video for Convene 2026.

Recognition on an onboarding form

When a supplier completes an onboarding form, uploads a certificate and receives confirmation that the business has been added to the system, none of those steps indicates that the buyer has work for it, that anyone will search the field the certificate populated, or that any spending will follow as a result.

Discussion of supplier diversity often loses this distinction, which applies at each stage of purchasing: recognition of a supplier is separate from an invitation to tender, an invitation is separate from a contract, and a category that appears on a form is different from a category against which people inside the organisation are measured.

How Australia’s existing categories differ

In Australia’s existing arrangements, the Commonwealth’s Indigenous Procurement Policy attaches targets and specific procedural requirements to its category, so that a procurement officer who does not consider Indigenous suppliers in the required circumstances is in breach of a rule. Social Traders connects certified enterprises with members who have paid to be connected and who report what they spend. WEConnect verifies women owned businesses for a network. These are distinct mechanisms with different degrees of force behind them, and the differences are reflected in their results.

What a category changes for a supplier

For an owner, the useful test of a category is what it changes in practice: whether a procurement team will search that field when it needs a supplier, whether the business will be introduced to the person responsible for buying what it sells, and whether spend against the category is recorded and reviewed by anyone. A reporting field provides information about the existing supply chain, an introduction builds a new relationship, and a set aside changes the route by which a purchase is approached. Each has value for a different purpose, and a supplier who cannot tell which one has been offered is not in a position to decide sensibly whether to pursue it.

All of these arrangements depend on verification, since a category that requires a named certificate excludes every business that does not hold one, while a category that accepts alternative evidence, assessed case by case, is more open and less predictable. A scan of published policies that recorded only whether a local certifier is named would miss this distinction, which determines which businesses qualify.

The limits of a policy scan

A scan of public policies can establish what an organisation says but cannot on its own establish how consistently a policy is applied or whether any supplier has benefited from it. Interviews can add an account of practice, although a single account does not amount to a national pattern. For this reason the Pride in Business research will distinguish between explicit recognition, accepted verification and evidence of implementation, and where a policy is silent it will record it as not stated in the documents reviewed, without treating the silence as exclusion.

In the other direction, a long list of recognised suppliers does not show whether work is concentrated among a few established firms or reaches smaller ones, and it does not show how long suppliers wait to be paid. A category may look generous in a policy and have no effect on purchasing, while a buyer with no such category in any policy document may already purchase from exactly the businesses it would have covered.

Implications for the LGBTIQA+ research

The LGBTIQA+ research therefore needs to investigate both recognition and use, in that order, and to avoid the obvious shortcut of counting the forms that lack a field, declaring an absence and proposing a new category to fill it. Counting forms in that way would show whether the forms had become more inclusive without showing whether purchasing had changed, which is the outcome of most consequence to a business owner. Before concluding that a new category is required, the research needs to establish what the existing routes permit, where they fail the people using them, and whether each failure lies in recognition or in follow through. The findings are likely to differ between buyers, and both advocacy and the design of any new arrangement will need to take those differences into account.

Sources

1. National Indigenous Australians Agency. Indigenous Procurement Policy, May 2026, sections 1.8 and 2.1.
2. Social Traders. Social enterprise certification.
3. WEConnect International. Certification: eligibility, ownership, management and control.

Source pages last checked 19 September 2026.