"median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group"
Their peer group being under 30, childless, unmarried, metropolitan. These are probably strongly skewing caveats but sounds exactly like the market that internmatch targets.
And, I think an unpaid internship can be a win-win for both parties in at least some situations.
And, as a libertarian, I reject the notion that the govt. has any business interfering in private contractual arrangements that don't involve the use of force or fraud.
So, would we offer and engage in an unpaid internship at Fogbeam Labs? Well... I don't know. As I said, I don't think they should be prohibited, but the idea also leaves something of a sour taste in my mouth.
We've been talking to some intern candidates over the past couple of weeks, and the idea we've been batting around is to offer a fixed sum stipend, on the order of a few thousand dollars, as compensation for a 6-8 week internship, where the intern would be asked to contribute around 20 hours / week.
8 * 20 = 160 hours, and at $10.00 / hour, you'd be looking at $1600 dollars. The number we have in mind is higher than that, so I guess we actually are talking about paying more than minimum wage. We could only afford to take on one intern at that rate though, but that's probably OK... I doubt the founders have the bandwidth to manage more than one intern anyway.
The time delay between creating the value and turning that value in money. In a situation like ours, a pre-revenue, bootstrapped startup, we can create a ton of value, but nobody knows exactly when our first (and subsequent) sales will be.
Now, if an intern wanted an arrangement with deferred compensation, contingent on some future revenue, etc., etc., that could theoretically be arranged. But it probably wouldn't be worth the effort to do all that.
OTOH, value can be exchanged in other ways other than money. An intern who works for "free" in the monetary sense may still benefit from the situation. A strong letter of recommendation and a verifiable reference to put on the resume represent a form of value as well.
But, all of that said, I'm still not super crazy about unpaid internships. Like I said above, if we take on any intern(s) we are looking to pay them.
I wouldn't be hiring a PR or Marketing person otherwise, it isn't necessary. Numerous times friends of friends have asked for an internship, I've said we aren't ready to hire in that position yet, and they have offered to work for free, for experience, or for college credit.
The better way of alleviating this is to have a skillset that not everyone else has, that any college graduate can't duplicate.
