Dating apps

In the world of online dating, racial inequalities are rife. For example, black men and women are 10 times more likely to message white users than the reverse.

Some apps themselves may create biases, according to research and reporting. In 2016 a BuzzFeed reporter found that the dating app CoffeeMeetsBagel suggested only partners of the same race, even when users said they had no preference.

This year Grindr announced a “zero-tolerance” policy on racism and discrimination, threatening to ban people who used racist language. The app is considering the removal of options to filter potential dates by race. A 2015 paper by researchers in Australia said 96% of Grindr users had viewed at least one profile that included some sort of racial discrimination, and more than half believed they had been victims of racism.

Cancer care

Black women in England are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with advanced breast cancer as white women, with 25% of black African and 22% of black Caribbean patients found to have the later stage of the disease, compared with 13% of white patients, according to an analysis in 2016.

Heather Nelson, of the charity BME Cancer Voice, said women of colour were less likely to go to screenings because the services were perceived to be targeted at white people. “You’ll get leaflets through your door and they will be predominantly of white, middle-class women,” she said. “There’s no representation of south Asian, African descent etc. If you get information like that, you’re going to look and think: that’s not about me.”

Q&A What is unconscious bias? Show Unconscious or implicit bias is one part of the explanation for why, despite equalities being enshrined in law, minority groups are still at a disadvantage in many parts of life. The term was popularised after US social psychologists devised a way of measuring the prejudices that we are not necessarily aware of – the Implicit Association Test. They published a paper in 1998 claiming that their tool for measuring "the unconscious roots of prejudice" showed that 90-95% of people were susceptible. While the reliability of that test is now contested, there is overwhelming wider evidence that unconscious bias seeps into decisions that affect recruitment, access to healthcare and outcomes in criminal justice in ways that can disadvantage black and minority ethnic people. One study found that university professors were far more likely to respond to emails from students with white-sounding names. Another showed that white people perceived black faces as more threatening than white faces with the same expression. While some of our biases may begin on an unconscious level, experts caution that the concept of unconscious bias should not absolve people of discriminatory behaviour. “If you’re aware of these associations then you can bring to bear all of your critical skills and intelligence to see it’s wrong to think like that,” says Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist who studies prejudice and social learning at University College London. “We all have the ability to control that.”



Black African-Caribbean men are 30% more likely to die from the disease than white men, according to a 2013 report from BME Cancer Communities on what it called a “clear health inequality”. Awareness of the risks posed by cancer was generally lower among minority groups, and they were more likely to present later with symptoms that were more advanced, the report said.

Television

Minority ethnic groups are underrepresented in Britain’s TV industry, according to a diversity study by the media regulator Ofcom. It found black, Asian or minority ethnic people made up 12% of the workforce across the five main broadcasters, compared to 14% of the UK population overall.

As well as being an issue behind the scenes, lack of diversity is also a problem on screen. Cush Jumbo, best known for her role in the US TV series The Good Wife, has accused the British television and film industry of “pulling the plug” on actors of colour and said she repeatedly hit “the exotic best friend ceiling” when auditioning for roles in the UK.

Books

Almost a third of school-age children in 2017 were from a minority ethnic background, but only 4% of the 9,115 children’s books published that year featured minority ethnic characters, according to analysis by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education. And most of those were supporting roles, with just one in 100 books featuring a main character of colour.

Where characters from ethnic minorities did appear, they were frequently in stories tackling social justice issues focused on war and conflict, leading the researchers to ask: “Do those from minority backgrounds only have a platform when their suffering is being explored? And how does such disproportionate variation of representation skew perspectives of minority groups?”

Only 4% of the 9,115 children’s books published last year featured ethnic minority characters. Photograph: Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images

Dr Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, said research suggested young people who did not see themselves reflected back in literature and other media suffered a blow to their self-esteem, with consequences such as black children preferring white dolls and idolising white superheroes. “It’s also reflected later on: if you look at the statistics on skin-bleaching and lightening their hair, those are related,” he said.

This year the singer and TV presenter Alesha Dixon released Lightning Girl, the first of two books about a mixed-race female superhero, Aurora Beam. She said she had done so in part to give her 11-year-old daughter a role model. “She’s mixed heritage. When I look around, there aren’t many characters like her,” she said. “All you want as a parent is balance. Every child needs to be able to pick up a book and feel they are reflected and see themselves in the characters.”

School exclusions

Last year almost one in five schoolchildren from Gypsy or Irish Traveller backgrounds were suspended from school and about one in 250 were expelled, according to government figures.

While attention often focuses on black and mixed-race children and school exclusions, official data shows the worst affected are Gypsies and Irish Travellers, who are also among the poorest and most socially excluded of all Britain’s ethnic groups. Only about one in 20 white British pupils were suspended in the same period, and one in 1,000 expelled, and the figures were similar for black pupils.

Responding to the release of similar figures in 2016, Yvonne MacNamara, the chief executive of the Traveller Movement, said rates of exclusion were a “damning indictment of inequality and institutionalised racism in the education system”.

Football coaching

The Southend United manager, Chris Powell, has said there is a “lost generation” of black football players not being given a chance to coach once they retire. “As a black manager, I understand my role in trying to do my job correctly and to inspire others … I do feel there has been a lost generation of coaches, which shouldn’t happen again,” he said.

Q&A Tell us: have you been affected by the issues in this story? Show As part of the Guardian's Bias in Britain series we want to hear from readers and find out more about your experiences and perspectives. You can get in touch by filling in this encrypted form or contact the via WhatsApp by adding the contact +44(0)7867825056. Your responses will only be seen by the Guardian and we’ll be in touch if we are considering your response as part of our reporting. You can read terms of service here.

The Football Association announced in January that it would introduce a version of American football’s Rooney rule, meaning it will interview at least one minority candidate for every coaching position at its St George’s Park base.

Chris Powell, the Southend United manager, has said too few black football players are being given a chance to coach. Photograph: Graham Whitby Boot/SUFC/Rex/Shutterstock

Mental health

“We had taken Seni to hospital because we thought it was the best place for him when he became ill,” said the parents of Olaseni Lewis, a 23-year-old student who died in 2010 after his brain was starved of oxygen during restraint by police in a seclusion room at Bethlem Royal hospital in south London.

It was not. As Matilda MacAttram, the director of Black Mental Health UK, outlined in a submission to the UN special rapporteur on racial discrimination in 2016, black Britons in particular suffer from “a history or misunderstanding and discrimination” in mental healthcare. MacAttram cited studies that found racist diagnostic methods were behind a higher incidence of psychosis reported among black people. There were also problems with overmedication, coercive treatment and use of violent methods of restraint against black patients, she said.

Data published last December showed that black people in contact with mental health services were three times more likely to be restrained than white people. Black people are also more than four times more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and more than eight times more likely to be subject to community treatment orders, separate figures published last month show.

Last year Martin Babu Mwesigwa, a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, asked when the government planned to address “the discriminatory and disproportionate use of the Mental Health Act against its people of African descent living in the UK”.

Teaching

Black and Asian teachers in Britain have complained of being saddled with stereotypical roles in schools. In a poll by the Runnymede Trust, they said they were often given behaviour responsibilities rather than more challenging teaching or leadership roles. They called for more support from senior staff in handling incidents of racism. Meanwhile, the vast majority of headteachers in England (93.5%) describe themselves as white British, according to government data.

Home ownership

Home ownership fell among all ethnic groups between 2001 and 2016, but more so among black people (by 10 percentage points) than white people (four points). Now just 29% of black “household reference persons” own their own property – the lowest of all ethnic groups.

This is both a symptom and a cause of poverty in the black community. In the UK, home ownership is one of the prime ways for families to accrue wealth, and wealth breeds opportunity, says Kevin Gulliver, the director of the Human City Institute, a research charity. “Any disparity in tenure is going to have a knock-on effect down the generations – in terms of access to education, and other factors in social mobility.”

Fewer than three in 10 black ‘household reference persons’ own their own property. Photograph: Kie/imageBroker/Rex/Shutterstock

While the introduction of right to buy boosted ownership among white working-class families, rules on council housing in the 1970s and 80s – such as length of tenure – often shut out those from minority ethnic backgrounds, Gulliver said.

Almost half of black families are concentrated in what little council housing the country has left, while about one in five are in private rented accommodation, which includes some of the least habitable homes in the country.

Universities

Black students in England are 1.5 times more likely to drop out than their white and Asian counterparts, according to a study co-published by the University Partnerships Programme Foundation (UPP) and the Social Market Foundation (SMF). The findings suggest that while there has been a measured effort to improve diversity in higher education, less thought has been given to the range of social, cultural and structural factors that make black students more likely to quit.

Student union officers have urged universities to do more to tackle racism, claiming they often wait until incidents blow up on social media before taking action.