An Op-Ed piece in The New York Times last May questioned the economics of the unpaid internship. Are we doing long-term damage to the labor market and economy by encouraging bright and energetic students to work for free? Teaching the future work force to be grateful to work for nothing undermines capitalism, the column argues.

Moreover, Anya Kamenetz, the author, suggests that creating this bastion of unpaid laborers to potentially fill holes made by layoffs has an effect similar to employing illegal immigrants: “they create an oversupply of work for low wages, or in the case of interns, literally nothing.”

The column cited (as if this should be jarring in some way) a survey by Vault, a career information website, which found that 84 percent of college students planned to take at least one unpaid internship during their four years at school.

A quick look around Cornell would corroborate that finding. Though the investment banks that recruit so heavily on campus compensate their interns rather generously, many of the other industries that hire Cornellians for the summer do not. Media outlets could line city blocks with the number of applicants they have for unpaid summer positions; government jobs across the country have a pretty standard intern salary of $0/week.

These positions are competitive, too. Most unpaid interns at C.U. undergo several rounds of interviews before they get the jobs that they eventually take. Heck, to do so much as participate in the Cornell Externship Program, students have to answer several pages worth of short answer essay questions — and that’s just to follow someone around for a day or two.

The industries that choose to pay their interns and the ones that don’t create something of a gender gap in the undergraduate population. According to a study of college graduates over the last 10 years conducted by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation released yesterday, male students preferred engineering, mathematics and physical sciences. Female students, on the other hand, tended toward areas such as education, health and psychology. Google pays their interns; the U.S. Department of Education does not. Males are making more over the summer than females.

I’ve taken some of those unpaid internships, and as a communication major, I plan to pursue a career in a field that pays its employees less than some other industries.

But wasn’t it reassuring for me to learn yesterday that even if I had chosen a more male-dominated major, and entered a better-paying field, that I’d still be more likely to earn less than my male counterparts. According to the AAUW study, one year out of college, women working full time earn 80 percent of what men earn, and the differences are visible even between men and women who had studied in the same field. In education, for example, women earn 95 percent as much as their male colleagues earn; in math, women’s salaries drop to 76 percent of men’s salaries for the same jobs.

Comparably alarming, 10 years out of school, the study found that women earn 69 percent as much as men earn. The number of women in the workforce in this second demographic is lower, however.

According to the Reuters article on the study, “Among women who graduated from college between 1992-1993, more than one-fifth of mothers were out of the work force a decade later, and another 17 percent were working part time.” Mothers were more likely than both men and other women to take a leave or to work part time.

The biology of the situation cannot be changed. It’s a fact — women bear children. But if the assumption is that women are more likely to leave the company because they are physiologically equipped to have children, and that logic reflects itself in their salaries, then we have some bigotry at work. The report showed that about one-quarter of the pay gap is attributable to gender.

Some women are happy to stay at home with their children. Look around The Hill and you can probably find dozens of them out there.

But for the rest, the decline in number of women in the workforce is the result of a self–fulfilling prophecy.

If women are being paid less for the same work, they have far less incentive to return to the office. Even if they come back, the study found that they are more likely to work part time, and working a limited number of hours per week is not likely to enable them to catch up in pay.

And the fact that they start out so far behind is likely to perpetuate the phenomenon.

Thankfully, I stuck with my gut and took the courses that interested me; the difference wouldn’t have paid out, anyway. Even if I’d switched my major three years back and taken one of those paid internships, I’d probably be making less than the guys to my left and my right.

Erica Fink is The Sun’s former Editor in Chief. She can be contacted at ebf6@cornell.edu. Fink Again appears Tuesdays.