Nathalie Ramirez Rojas spent the spring of her junior year at Baruch College splitting her time over two equally formidable tasks: acing her exams and scouring job boards for a paid internship in the social sciences.
“I actually saw an internship when I was applying that looked perfect but when I took a closer look I realized they wanted an unpaid intern for 40 hours a week,” said Ramirez Rojas, who’s focusing her career toward mental health and hopes to work as a therapist in the future. “I thought that was insane.”
Ramirez Rojas’s experience is not unique. Women are consistently overrepresented in unpaid internships, data show. A recent study of students attending four-year colleges and universities in 2022 found that two-thirds of the graduating male respondents received paid internships compared to less than half of women, despite women representing 70% of the 2,140 seniors surveyed. The research, conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, is in line with other findings from previous years, suggesting that undergraduate work experiences might set the stage for pay inequality between men and women all along the course of their careers.
