In a number of industries — media, fashion, politics, the arts, parts of law and the charity sector — the conventional route into an entry-level position runs through a period of unpaid or minimally paid work.
The effect of this arrangement is straightforward and has been documented repeatedly: it selects for people who can afford to work without income, usually in a city with high living costs, usually for several months.
What the research finds
Studies of internship participation consistently find that unpaid internships are taken disproportionately by students from higher-income families, and that the effect is larger in the highest-status sectors.
Research on subsequent outcomes has found that unpaid internships are associated with worse employment and earnings outcomes than paid internships, and in some analyses no better than no internship at all — a finding that complicates the usual justification.
Analyses of workforce composition in the affected industries find them to be considerably less socioeconomically diverse than the general graduate population, and the internship route is one of the identified mechanisms.
Where the gender dimension sits
The primary axis here is class rather than gender, and it would be a distortion to present it otherwise.
But there are two intersections worth naming.
The sectors most dependent on unpaid entry work are disproportionately those with high female applicant numbers — media, fashion, arts administration, charity, publishing. The barrier therefore filters a heavily female applicant pool.
And there is a documented pattern in which industries with an oversupply of applicants sustain worse entry conditions. Sectors that many people want to work in can extract more from entrants, and several of the sectors in question are exactly that.
The result is that some of the industries with the strongest female representation at entry level also have the most exclusionary entry route and the lowest entry pay, and these facts are related.
The legal position
The legality of unpaid internships varies by jurisdiction and is frequently misunderstood by both parties.
In many jurisdictions, a person performing work of value under direction, with set hours and defined responsibilities, meets the legal definition of a worker and is entitled to at least the minimum wage, regardless of what the arrangement is called.
The label "intern" has no legal force in most such systems. What matters is the substance of the arrangement — whether the person is genuinely shadowing and observing, or performing work the organisation would otherwise have to pay someone to do.
Enforcement is generally weak, in large part because the people with standing to complain are the people least able to afford the consequences of complaining, and because the sectors involved are small enough for reputational risk to be real.
What has changed
Several things, unevenly.
A number of large employers have moved to paid-only internship policies, and some professional bodies have adopted standards. In sectors where this has happened, the composition of intakes has in several documented cases shifted.
Some jurisdictions have tightened or clarified their rules, and some have banned unpaid internships beyond short durations outright.
Public advertising requirements have increased in some sectors, which addresses a related problem — internships allocated through personal contact rather than open application, which layers a network filter on top of the financial one.
What an individual can do about it
Less than one would like, but not nothing.
Check the legal position in the relevant jurisdiction before assuming an unpaid arrangement is normal. A substantial share of them are not lawful, and organisations asked about it directly sometimes discover this themselves.
Ask what is paid. Some organisations pay expenses, some pay stipends, and some have funded places that are not advertised as such. Asking costs nothing and the answer is frequently better than the advertisement implies.
Look for funded schemes. Many universities, professional bodies and foundations fund internship bursaries specifically because of this problem, and they are consistently undersubscribed because nobody knows about them.
Consider whether the sector's entry norm is actually load-bearing. In several fields, the assumption that an unpaid internship is required is a norm rather than a requirement, and applicants who did not do one are appointed regularly.
The argument for the sector's own interest
The usual case against unpaid entry work is fairness. There is a second case that has more traction with employers.
An entry filter based on family wealth selects on a variable uncorrelated with talent. Any organisation using it is systematically excluding capable applicants and hiring from a narrower distribution than it could.
For industries whose product depends on understanding a wide public — media in particular — the composition problem is also a product problem, and the evidence on the socioeconomic composition of newsrooms relative to their audiences makes that case fairly directly.
That argument has moved more organisations than the fairness one, which is worth knowing for anyone trying to move an organisation.