Almost half of doctors (45%) and a third of nurses (33%) personally witnessed a patient being neglected or suffering a lack of dignity on the NHS, or receiving poor quality care.

Some 39% of doctors and 34% of nurses, from the poll of 1,084, said they thought patients suffered discrimination.

Michèle Belot∗

Nuffield College, University of Oxford

March 16, 2011

Abstract

This study asks the following questions: Is it harder to remember people from other races? And do these cognitive limitations have dis- criminatory implications? We conduct an experiment in a controlled laboratory environment. Participants are shown pictures of potential "candidates" of different races - East Asian and white - and each can- didate is associated with a value. There are no systematic differences in the value distribution across races. They are asked to recall the faces of the candidates with the highest values. I find that people are much better able to recall candidates with higher values if they are of the same race. This leads to positive and negative discrimination at the same time: those at the bottom of the value distribution benefit while those at the top lose out. These results suggest that cognitive biases could play a role in the nature of cross-racial relations, in par- ticular for racial discrimination, homophily and phenomena relying on repeated interactions and individual recognition, such as the formation and maintenance of social ties and the establishment of trust relation- ships.

More than three-quarters of UK companies pay men more on average than women, BBC analysis of government figures suggests.

The median pay gap among those companies was 9.7%.

The figures indicate 78% of firms pay men more than women on average, while 14% pay women more.

This is based on the median measure, which is the level of pay that separates the top half of earners from the lower half.

In total, 8% said they had no pay gap between men and women.

The gender pay gap is not the same as having unequal pay, which would be against the law. By law, men and women with the same jobs have to be paid the same wages.

A gender pay gap can arise if there are more highly paid men than women in a company, or if women are deemed to be less experienced than their male counterparts, or if women take a hit to their salary after taking maternity leave.

In reporting gender pay, firms with more than 250 staff have to publish data on the average difference between male and female employees.