Abstract

An important part of academic education that has received only little attention to date are mandatory student internships. We show for the first time that during mandatory internships women are paid less than men. Further analyses using novel matched-student-employment data indicate that the internship-pay-gap translates into a career-entry-pay-gap of about the same size. Our analyses also reveal that women expect a lower job-entry wage than men even before they enter college, while we do not find that selecting into an industry or the choice of study major drive the internship-gap. Internships thus seem to confirm and reinforce the academic wage-expectation-gap which may ultimately be one of the driving factors of the gender pay gap when entering the labor market.