Women’s RWC 2025 And Beyond – Innovations, Roadmap, and Gender Equity

This Women’s RWC 2025 (Rugby World Cup), like every major pinnacle rugby event we attend, gets the brain racing at a million miles per hour. The conversations about the state of the game, the opportunities, the flaws and where to go next for this sport. We look at some of the innovations, the women’s game roadmap and why World Rugby is prioritising gender equity as part of its strategy.

Sarah Massey, Managing Director, Rugby World Cup 2025, answered Rugby Asia 247 question at the media conference on the innovations at this Women’s RWC 2025, saying: “We knew right from the very beginning that we needed to create quite a different fan experience. We had done a lot of work and a lot of research when we first started to put tickets out on sale. Also, since we knew who our purchasers were, we actually went out and asked them: Have you ever watched a women’s rugby match before? Have you ever been to this venue before?

So we had loads of really rich data of what it was that they wanted from a fan experience. What food did they want? What drink did they want? We knew that also. Many of them were bringing children. Over 30% were bringing children with them to the matches. So we needed to make sure that we were providing all of those services, all of those facilities for families, and that’s exactly what we’ve done because we did it based on the data.

From a sports presentation perspective, you’ll see those in-bowl moments; we’ve got explainer videos on the big screens. We knew we weren’t talking to an educated audience on rugby straightaway, so we made sure that we were engaging with the explainer video so that people understood what the rules were, what to look out for.

We’ve got female DJs involved. We’ve really brought that atmosphere to life on the pitch, and in the fan plazas at the venue and also in the fan zones in the city. That’s paramount to what we’ve been trying to do. The sponsors are all getting behind us as well to make sure that they are also engaging with different activities around the tournament.”

Sally Horrox, Chief of Women’s Rugby, World Rugby added, “On a broader point around the development of the game, us raising the profile of women’s rugby in countries around the world and working with them to raise profile is the first step to then being able to increase investment and commercial support and unlocking funding from governments, which is the focus for us in terms of financial sustainability over the next four years.”

Some of the key RWC 2025 initiatives, as outlined by Sarah Massey, are:

• The ambition was to go beyond the pitch and empower real change
• To break down barriers and challenge stereotypes
• The slogan “if you can’t see it, then you can’t believe you can be it” has been embraced and reinforced.
• To champion women and underrepresented groups – interns, volunteers, staff, suppliers
• There is an all-female leadership team
• 62 per cent of volunteers  are women
• 14/16 team security advisors are women
• The grounds crew for the final at Allianz will be all-female

Image Credit – World Rugby

Smart Mouthguards – Women’s RWC 2025

Sally Horrox, Chief of Women’s Rugby at World Rugby, said of the new mouthguards being used for the first time. “We’ve been delighted with the uptake, first of all, on the instrumented mouth guards. And it’s just worth referencing that we’ve led in the women’s game with this technology as part of our commitment to player welfare.”

Yvonne Nolan, Competition Director for Rugby World Cup 2025, added, “It’s part of the development. The women were the first group of players to wear these mouth guards, so it’s terrific to see how far again, we’ve come since we launched that programme.

At the weekend, we had six alerts, of which three were unique. So that means that there was no other sign or indicator that a player needed to be removed for HIA [head injury assessment]. That shows they’re working, that this technology is giving us another tool we can use to make sure the players are as safe as they can possibly be.”

Nolan added after the second weekend of matches, “They’ve been very effective to date. We’ve had 10 iMG (Prevent Instrumented Mouthguard) alerts so far across the games. All of the players will go for an HIA (head-injury assessment), some will return to play, some will fail the HIA, then go through the return-to-play process.

One of the critical successes for us is that the video we put out, explaining how they work, has been one of our most-viewed, and that is a great outcome for us in terms of education and player welfare.”

Dominic Rumbles, World Rugby Chief Communications Officer, said at a media conference on 2nd September 2025 that the video has surpassed ten million views on socials (as assume he means collectively accross all platforms.)

Advancing The Women’s Game

On moving the game forward, Sally Horrox, Chief of Women’s Rugby at World Rugby, told media, “To the extent that we have a different way of presenting the game, we need to adapt and look at the laws of the game.

We need to look at the performance data. We need to look at the way the athletes communicate and present themselves. There was real unity behind doing things differently to maximise the opportunity in front of us. It should still look like rugby union but one that absolutely capitalises on everything that is great about what women can do on and off the pitch.”

At the tournament’s opening media conference, World Rugby Chairman Brett Robinson said the tournament is fuelling the game and changing lives and that World Rugby is spending 50 million pounds over this cycle and creating new markets and new opportunities for the game. He added that the pinnacle events, and this is one of them, are working well under the new model.

Alan Gilpin, World Rugby CEO said that the men’s game can take a leaf from the women’s game.“We’ve got brilliant characters in the women’s game who aren’t going to have to put a lid on those personalities.

Whether it’s the dancing between the teams after the match, the interaction with fans or their engagement on social media, that is a genie you can’t put back very easily in the bottle. I hope that we continue to see that in the women’s game, and that in the men’s game there are some lessons – that personality doesn’t have to be a performance inhibitor.”

We will reflect at the end of the tournament on why the engagement has been so positive in this tournament. It’s having players so much more accessible to fans. The key thing we have to do with the men’s game is show our stakeholders that it’s not something that should be feared in the tournament environment, in terms of player performance and team competitiveness, as we look forward to the men’s edition in Australia in 2027. What can we do to take it to the next level?”

Image Credit – World Rugby

Some of the key points made by Horrox on the progress of the women’s game, which celebrate global gender equity, are:

• Women’s rugby is 40 years old, this is the tenth edition of the Rugby World Cup, but we need to look beyond this to see what’s going on
• The global calendar World Rugby has, in collaboration with unions, offers a roadmap to RWC 2029 and RWC 2033
• There will be a WXV press conference held over the coming weeks to offer certainty of fixtures and competition through to the  Rugby World Cup 2033.

She also said, and we are paraphrasing here, that the personality of female athletes is different to men and the way they approach the sport, the humour, etc is different.

The pathway to professionalism and the relatable nature of the women athletes and rugby players are authentic in her experience, and the sports she has been involved in, where women have moved to a professional model, they have remained honest and relatable on their pathway to professionalism. And that even as athletes get more media savvy, their personalities will shine through.

Rugby World Cup 2025 News

• Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 Title Sequences Commissioned by 16 Female Artists From Participating Nations.
• The Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 is Here and We Are All For It.
• Women’s Rugby World Cup England 2025 Sees an Increase in The Number of Female Coaches Involved