gdb appears to ignore executable capabilities

I am debugging a program that makes use of libnetfilter_queue. The documentation states that a userspace queue-handling application needs the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability to function. I have done this using the setcap utility as follows:

$ sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip ./a.out

I have verified that the capabilities are applied correctly as a) the program works and b) getcap returns the following output:

$ getcap ./a.out
./a.out = cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw+eip

However, when I attempt to debug this program using gdb (e.g. $ gdb ./a.out) from the command line, it fails on account of not having the correct permissions set. The debugging functionality of gdb works perfectly otherwise and debugs as per normal.

I have even attempted to apply these capabilities to the gdb binary itself to no avail. I did this as it seemed (as documented by the manpages that the "i" flag might allowed the debugee to inherit the capability from the debugger.

Is there something trivial I am missing or can this really not be done?