The popularity of women’s rugby has flourished in recent years, especially off the back of the Women’s World Cup this summer, with more women and girls playing and taking an interest in the game than ever. Statistics gathered by World Rugby in 2023 discovered that active female player registration had increased by 37%, and a quarter of global rugby players were female. Compiled just over two years ago, this report identified that women and girls were major drivers of growth for the game then, so it is exciting to imagine how much bigger women’s rugby has subsequently become after the shining success of the Red Roses at Twickenham just two months ago.

The ever-surging presence of women within rugby is evident not just at the elite level, but also in the number of female players, coaches, officials, fans, and sponsors from grassroots to the national stage. The impact of visibility and funding towards major international tournaments cannot go unnoticed, with players such as Ilona Maher accruing 8.7 million followers across social channels, and the Australian ‘Wallaroos’ social accounts achieving an incredible 985% follower increase over 2025.

Although the traction and popularity of women’s rugby is undeniable, the provision of club and country funding and resource allocation is still playing catch-up. For example, the Canadian national Women’s rugby team had to crowdfund over £1 million Canadian Dollars for their World Cup campaign this year, despite being ranked 2nd in the world and almost winning the entire tournament. This means that many women’s clubs are largely working with an absence of funding, proper coaching, or injury prevention protocols, and even the clubs that do have systems in place are likely to be based on male research and data.

So why is it then that the women’s game still lacks these fundamental support systems, even in the highest professional levels?

To answer this question, we have to address rugby’s history. Traditionally, Rugby was long regarded as a “men’s sport”, and although women have played the game since the 1800s, the social stigma associated with this was overwhelmingly negative. The physicality, strength, and aggression typically expected of rugby players are inherently masculine traits, and thus the vast majority of rugby institutions and systems have been built around data on men and male performance.
Now let’s fast-forward to modern day, where women have claimed their place in this societally ‘male’ sport and developed multiple professional pathways globally. Those long-established ‘male’ systems and institutions have not been replaced with data catering towards female physiology and findings, but instead have been copied and pasted into the women’s game. Now, many women feel they have to wrestle with conflicting societal expectations to deliver both a dominant performance based on male metrics, while also upholding their femininity. In other words, they have to “act like women but play like men”.

This might not appear to be problematic at face value, seeing as these systems have been standardised over years of research and implemented at every level of the men’s game, and have been proven effective. However, it is a known fact that women and men fundamentally differ in their physiology, an example being the increased prevalence of ACL and concussive injuries seen in women compared to men, based on biomechanical and anatomical differences. Thus, this inevitably will affect how coaching, player welfare, and injury prevention should be approached.

For example, only 4% of rugby tackle research has been conducted with female participants, and themes such as the menstrual cycle, injury, fatigue and recovery are severely under-researched in female player populations. These statistics highlight a worrying gap in the provision of appropriate and relevant safety protocols in women’s rugby, calling for a closer inspection and overhaul of outdated data.

A qualitative study by Dane et al. (2023) uncovered that women who play rugby overwhelmingly experienced “ineffective or a lack of tackle coaching”. Concerningly, a plethora of research has found that the ‘tackle’ is the dominant source of injury and concussions in the women’s game, and these figures are higher in women over men. An attempt at explaining this difference is through apparent gender differences in the mechanisms of the head impact, notably that women’s neck strength is (up to 47%) lower than men’s, possibly causing the higher incidence of whiplash almost exclusive to female head injuries.

It is becoming increasingly apparent, then, that rugby needs a renovation in the women’s game to account for the physiological, psychological, and social differences between the sexes. The introduction of new lower tackle height laws, and data coming from instrumented mouthguards and video analysis have already provided encouraging insights. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg in setting solid foundations for women’s rugby, based on women’s data!

The ever-growing success and support for Women in rugby point towards further growth and development, but the sport needs these changes to stem from within existing structures and cultures to provide women with tailored pathways to safe, professional play. It is up to the relevant governing bodies, federations, and research institutions to take responsibility for this change and drive women’s rugby into a safer future by addressing inequalities and demanding better standards.