Just 5% of Skydio drone pilots are women

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, American drone maker Skydio shared some of its user data. We’ll let you decide if we should call the results sharing the gender makeup of Skydio drone pilots is completely surprising or completely unsurprising.

Roughly 5% of Skydio 2 drones were purchased by women, while 95% were from men, according to user data released in March 2021 by the company. The percent of female Skydio drone pilots is slightly less than the national average of commercial drone pilots overall, where about 6.7% of the 160,302 FAA registered Remote Pilots were women (that’s according to Federal Aviation Administration Aeronautical Center Data).

That said, the numbers of drone pilots who are female are not much lower than the aviation industry as a whole. 7% of commercial pilots licenses are held by women, and 6.6% of private pilots licenses are held by women. 

One note about Skydio’s data: it was based on the top 100 most common male and female names rather than people checking a box identifying themselves by gender. While the data is theoretically correct, there could very well be a male Olivia or a female James. Additionally, a male could have purchased the drone, but whose to say a female isn’t the one flying it (and vice versa).

With that said, Skydio released another piece of interesting data. On Facebook and Instagram — where you can self-identify by gender — the company said less than 9% of its followers were female.

Skydio does have a LinkedIn group geared toward Skydio drone pilots who identify as female called Skydiennes. If you’re looking for online female drone communities to join, we also recommend Amelia Droneharts on Facebook. There’s a main webpage, but most of the chatter happens in their private Facebook group. For other awesome female communities, check out Girls Who Drone, a group for women in the San Francisco Bay Area. And, check out Women and Drones, a physical and virtual community primarily known for its annual Women to Watch awards.

Read more: The most influential drone women to follow online in 2020

Skydio shared information about the gender disparity among Skydio drone pilots as part of an interesting post on its blog that also included some pretty thoughtful musings on why women might be less inclined to purchase a drone, and how the industry might be able to better work to change that. Check out Skydio’s post about women in the drone industry, written in light of Women’s History month, here.

Skydio is the maker of a few different drones including, most famously, the Skydio 2. The Skydio 2, which starts at $999, is largely considered the only “truly autonomous” drone, as six, 200-degree color cameras allow Skydio 2 to see everything in every direction so it theoretically never crashes. With that, the Skydio 2 is perfectly built for filming action sports like snowboarding or skateboarding, as it can even navigate around trees, analyze ski slopes, and avoid tunnels and archways with ease.