A total of 387 participants completed the 2019 Survey of Program Graduates. These individuals identified themselves as having completed or being in the process of completing a video-game-based program at a post-secondary institution. The participants included both undergraduate and graduate students.
The number of respondents who stated that working in the video games industry would be their first choice for a job dropped significantly the more years they spent in the industry. For example, at five years since graduation, the percentage of men who said that the video games industry would be their first choice for employment was 64%, compared with 95% of men who just graduated.
Women saw a much more precipitous decline, going from 85% to 40%. The rate drops particularly quickly for women after in the industry, falling from 90% one year after graduation to 64% after two. There could be many reasons for this. One might be the well-documented toxicity of some aspects of the industry to women—a factor already covered in-depth by both academics and games journalists.
It is also worth considering other factors that may be at play. Further research on this topic could shed valuable light on how people’s desire to work in a particular industry changes over time, and whether the trend stabilizes or potentially reverses over a longer period of time.