diff --git a/gitdb/utils/encoding.py b/gitdb/utils/encoding.py
index 25ebead..b534ef7 100644
--- a/gitdb/utils/encoding.py
+++ b/gitdb/utils/encoding.py
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-def force_bytes(data, encoding="ascii"):
+def force_bytes(data, encoding="utf-8"):
     if isinstance(data, bytes):
         return data