Here’s Team BlackSheep’s response to sexist remarks

A few weeks back, a drone enthusiast who goes by Anders came across something he found to be offensively sexist on Team BlackSheep’s online shop.

It read, “By combining their power we slashed a whopping 12% off the individual set price, which will probably go well with your wives or girlfriends :)”Team BlackSheep Online Store Premium FPV components and solutions

Anders stood up to this perceived sexism by emailing Pirker, explaining why he viewed the shop text as a gender stereotype and suggested considering changing it.

“It assumes the FPS-enthusiast browsing your store is male and sends a signal that women are not welcome,” he wrote in a private email to Pirker, that was later posted to the TBS Facebook page. “No wonder there are so few women flying FPV if this is the attitude they have to put up with everywhere. Please consider re-phrasing the text to remove any sexist jokes.”

Pirker wrote back saying, “The text isn’t sexist, and according to our statistics, our audience is 99.8% male. With the exception of a few females…some of them opening tickets complaining about sexist remarks :)”

I wrote about this in an earlier piece on my site as part of a glimpse into the broader sexism of the drone industry.

Since then, Raphael Pirker, Trappy, wrote a response on his site. It’s humble, it’s wistful, and I’m deeply grateful that someone as influential as Trappy would take the effort to make a profound post like this public on his page. This is a perfect example of the steps the industry needs to take — looking back at past examples of sexism and looking at how we can stop it. Trappy is one of the first major figures in drones to take that step.