diff --git a/Lib/test/test_pkgutil.py b/Lib/test/test_pkgutil.py
index 53456c2f7659e2..b162f9949ff697 100644
--- a/Lib/test/test_pkgutil.py
+++ b/Lib/test/test_pkgutil.py
@@ -246,7 +246,11 @@ def test_name_resolution(self):
 
         for uw in unicode_words:
             d = os.path.join(self.dirname, uw)
-            os.makedirs(d, exist_ok=True)
+            try:
+                os.makedirs(d, exist_ok=True)
+            except  UnicodeEncodeError:
+                # When filesystem encoding cannot encode uw: skip this test
+                continue
             # make an empty __init__.py file
             f = os.path.join(d, '__init__.py')
             with open(f, 'w') as f: