Rugby union, generally referred to as simply rugby, is a fast-paced and bodily workforce sport. Extra women and girls in Canada and all over the world are enjoying it now than ever earlier than.
As of 2021, ladies’s rugby reached a file 2.7 million gamers globally, a 25 per cent enhance over 4 years, and by 2023, ladies’s rugby participation was rising at a price of 38 per cent year-over-year.
Nations together with Australia, England, Eire and america provide skilled contracts for girls’s groups. Whereas these stay modest in comparison with the boys’s sport, they nonetheless symbolize a transparent step ahead.
Canada’s senior ladies’s XVs workforce is at present ranked second on the planet and heading into the 2025 Rugby World Cup, which kicks off on Aug. 22 in England. The nationwide sevens workforce additionally captured silver on the 2024 Paris Olympics — additional proof of the sport’s rising competitiveness in Canada.
Nonetheless, many programs, together with teaching and medical assist, haven’t saved tempo with the calls for of elite competitors. With visibility growing forward of the 2025 World Cup, stronger institutional assist is required to match the sports activities’ rising professionalism and recognition.
Security considerations
Typically described as a “game for all”, rugby builds confidence, resilience and lifelong friendships. For women and girls particularly, rugby will be empowering in methods few sports activities can match. It embraces the physicality of tackling, pushes again in opposition to conventional gender expectations and fosters solidarity and inclusion by valuing all physique shapes and skills.
However rugby can be a collision sport, and as such, it carries inherent dangers. Tackling is the highest reason for harm in rugby, and it has one of many highest concussion charges amongst youth women’ sports activities in Canada. Concussions can have long-term results on gamers’ well being.
These considerations are particularly pressing as the ladies’s sport turns into extra bodily and professionalized, and gamers are hit more durable and extra typically. Not like males’s rugby, ladies’s groups typically function with fewer medical or teaching assist sources, which might result in inconsistent or absent harm prevention applications.
United States’ Alex Sedrick is stopped by Canada’s Carissa Norton throughout Vancouver Sevens ladies’s rugby motion, in Vancouver on Feb. 23, 2025.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns
Compounding the chance is the truth that many ladies additionally come to rugby later in life, typically with much less expertise in touch sports activities. This delayed publicity restricts correct deal with talent improvement and participant confidence in touch. This implies protected tackling is much more necessary.
With out correct helps, the bodily dangers of the sport might outweigh its advantages.
Science continues to be enjoying catch-up
Whereas ladies’s rugby is rising quickly, the science behind it’s has not saved tempo. Most of what we learn about rugby security — the way to deal with, how a lot to coach or when it’s protected to return to play after harm — largely comes from analysis on males.
Choices round teaching and participant welfare have been based mostly on male information, leaving feminine gamers under-served and probably at better threat. Whereas these foundations might nicely apply to women and girls, the issue is we don’t but know for certain.
Solely 4 per cent of rugby deal with analysis has targeted on ladies. A lot of the early proof on women rugby comes from Canada, underscoring the nation’s management on this house. Nonetheless, most coaches and clinicians depend on a “one-size-fits-all” strategy that will not account for menstrual cycles, being pregnant, totally different harm profiles or later sport entry.
Canada’s Alysha Corrigan, left, and Asia Hogan-Rochester, proper, congratulate Florence Symonds, centre, on her attempt in opposition to the U.S. throughout a Vancouver Sevens ladies’s rugby sport in Vancouver in February 2025.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ethan Cairns
The variations matter as a result of power, pace and harm threat all differ. Ladies are 2.6 instances extra seemingly than males to maintain a concussion. Gender additionally shapes entry to coaching, care and amenities, typically limiting alternatives for girls to develop protected tackling expertise, obtain sufficient assist and practice in protected, well-resourced environments, elements that influence each efficiency and security.
Even security instruments mirror this hole. World Rugby’s Deal with Prepared and phone load tips had been designed round male athletes. Whereas well-intentioned, we all know little about how they work for women and girls. As an alternative of discarding these instruments, we have to adapt and consider them in feminine contexts to make sure they assist harm prevention and supply equal safety.
Ladies’s rugby wants higher information
Change is underway. Extra analysis and instruments are being designed particularly for women and girls. A search of PubMed, a database of printed biomedical analysis, reveals a steep rise in research on ladies’s rugby over the previous decade, particularly in harm surveillance, harm prevention, efficiency, physiology and sociocultural contexts.
Outcomes of a PubMed search of peer-reviewed literature on women’ and girls’s rugby since 2015, displaying year-on-year will increase in publications. (Creator offered)
New rule trials, similar to testing decrease deal with heights, are being evaluated on ladies athletes. New applied sciences like instrumented mouthguards and video evaluation are additionally serving to researchers perceive how women and girls deal with, how head impacts occur and the way they are often prevented.
A lot of this new analysis is led by our workforce on the Sport Damage Prevention Analysis Centre, a pan-Canadian, multidisciplinary group targeted on shifting upstream to forestall concussions in adolescent women’ rugby.
The ladies’s sport can be driving its personal improvements. Assets like World Rugby’s Contact Assured assist women and girls safely construct deal with expertise, significantly these new to contact sport.
Researchers are analyzing harm patterns, interviewing gamers and coaches and learning return-to-play pathways that mirror women’ and girls’s physiology and life levels.
The scope of analysis can be increasing to pelvic well being, breast safety and extra tailor-made harm prevention. International collaboration is making this work extra inclusive, spanning totally different international locations, talent ranges and age teams, not simply elite competitions.
However that is simply the beginning.
A golden alternative lies forward
Ladies’ and girls’s rugby is experiencing unprecedented progress. Rising participation, media consideration and new sponsorships are fuelling momentum. It’s a golden alternative to construct sturdy, sustainable foundations.
Gold-standard assist requires targeted, ongoing analysis and a dedication to sharing that proof with gamers, coaches, health-care suppliers and policymakers. It’s time to construct programs for girls’s rugby based mostly on ladies’s information, not borrowed assumptions from the boys’s sport.
However challenges stay. Some nationwide groups nonetheless have to lift funds to attend World Cups. Others practice with out constant entry to medical or efficiency employees — clear indicators that the ladies’s sport continues to be catching up.
To maintain and speed up the expansion of ladies’ and girls’s rugby, the game deserves extra sources and analysis tailor-made particularly to members. A “one-size-fits-all” mannequin now not works. By investing in programs which might be safer, targeted on prevention, extra inclusive and grounded in proof, we are able to construct a thriving future for girls’s rugby that lasts for generations to return.
