A content creator who has built an army of fans by showing off her motorcycle knowledge rather than her body is still receiving sexism online.
UsernameKate has more than 180,000 subscribers and followers across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X and publishes insightful bike reviews and footage from road trips.
The 5ft 4in rider, whose real name is Kate Ralph, worked in sales for Harley-Davidson, Ducati and BMW before making the switch to becoming a full-time social media personality but has revealed she’s still fighting misogyny as a woman in the industry.
Enjoy everything More Bikes by reading the MoreBikes monthly newspaper. Click here to subscribe, or Read FREE Online.
“I get comments to this day on YouTube like: ‘Why aren’t you in the kitchen?,’ she said on the popular motorbike podcast Full Chat, supported by insurance experts Bikesure.
“I used to take things properly to heart, like real thin-skinned. I’m a chronic people pleaser, so the minute someone was like ‘I don’t like that’, I was like ‘oof, knife to the heart. I’ve tried so hard, I want you to like me, please’. Then I realised you just can’t please some people.
“Some people are just nasty and are going to be nasty and it’s not a reflection on me, it’s more of a sad reflection on them. Really, you’re spending your Saturday night telling me at 10pm to get in the kitchen? What are you doing that’s leading you to be writing that on a Saturday night? Go live your life and do cool things.
“There are pros to being a female in this space and there are cons, of course. I’m not going to sugarcoat it; men like to look at girls. It’s how the world works. Don’t get me wrong, there’s guys who like to look at guys, and fair play, we all like what we like. But it is a bit more of an advantage. Then, you can down one of two routes; you go down the ‘woooooooooo’ route, getting the norks out and all that jazz, or you can go down the route of wanting to be taken seriously and wanting to prove that girls can know the same, if not more, than guys.”
The 34-year-old from Bolton became the first female brand ambassador of Bikesure, the UK’s largest motorcycle insurer, in 2021. She works alongside legendary superbike rider Carl Fogarty in representing the company and has teamed up with him to produce a host of content on the company’s behalf.
She is supporting her partner Mike Pye’s journey into pushing out two-wheeled content and concedes the “double-edged sword” of being a female in the male-dominated world of motorbikes has its positives and negatives.
“I was selling motorcycles as my YouTube took off and, again, as a female in sales, sometimes you feel a little bit on the back foot that someone will come in and they want to just tell you what they know and how amazing their knowledge is at motorcycles,” she added during her appearance on the show, which Bikesure powers.
“I was like: ‘I’m going to learn this product range like an absolute nerd and there is not going to be a stone unturned and nobody can come in and tell me something that I don’t know about this particular bike’. Facts, stats, specs – I’m going to ride them and know what I’m talking about so no one can accuse me of just trying to be a girl and using that to get far or get where I am at. I want to be taken seriously. When men come in, you get a sense of satisfaction deep within that they’re taking you seriously and they’re like: ‘Oh gosh, this girl knows what she’s doing’.
“The growth on social media is slower when you go down that route. There’s a lot of bellies out, boobs out, bums out on Instagram from girls, and they get massive followings, but to me it’s about a community and getting the right people on board. I don’t necessarily think that the audience who are consuming that sort of content is the type of content I’m striving for.
“It’s a pro being a woman in the sense that some guys will be like: ‘It’s a girl, better to look at’. I don’t think of myself as anything special of course but it is just a biological observation. But, from a negative point of view, you do have to work a bit harder to be taken seriously. You do get dismissed a lot, especially when I was in bike sales, which is probably why I felt like I had to work harder and strive for knowledge. Some guys don’t want a girl to sell you a bike because you’re not going to know anything. It is a double-edged sword.”
