Cleo Pallister-Turling winces. Just recalling the memory does it. She has two major concussions to her name, a price she paid for Cardiff University’s women’s rugby team. “Girls ask if I’m worried about getting injured,” the biomedical sciences student says. She isn’t. Not really.
For her the physicality is the point. The intensity. Nothing else compares.
Women’s rugby is booming. It used to be a ghost sport, a handful of clubs in the 1990. Now it’s everywhere. Over 400 UK clubs exist today, women make up a quarter of global players, and the growth is undeniable.
But safety? That hasn’t kept pace.
We know repetitive head blows are dangerous. We know the long-term risks. Yet the investment in researching female athletes remains pitiful. At the professional level, the threshold for taking a woman off for a head assessment is arbitrarily set at 12% lower than men. Just a guess. A potentially dangerous gap based on almost no data.
That ends now, sort of.
Researchers from Cardiff University’s school of engineering and brain imaging center are launching a study that shouldn’t have needed this much prompting. They are building the first head impact protocol for women’s rugby backed by actual science.
Not assumptions. Data.
The Method
It is a multi-pronged assault on the ignorance of sports science.
Engineers have followed the team all year. They use instrumented mouthguards. They run cognitive tests. They perform MRI scans. They use computer modelling. To their knowledge this is the first time all four methods have been applied to the same group.
It is heavy work. Cleo and her teammate Ffion James sat in hospital gowns while Disney’s The Incredibles played on monitors to keep them calm inside the MRI chamber. One of Cardiff’s systems is one of only four like it in the world.
Why does anyone do it?
“Women’s sports research is underrepresented. Look ten, fifteen years back and there’s nothing for women’s rugby. It hardly existed.” — Dr. Peter Theobald, Lead Researcher
The goal isn’t to scare girls off the pitch. Theobald is clear on that. The goal is truth. Shed light on the risk so women can choose knowingly.
Softer, Not Simpler
Here is the uncomfortable biological fact: The female brain is softer.
Dr. Theobald notes it directly. More vulnerable to concussion. What remains unknown is whether this vulnerability extends to sub-concussive blows. The ones you don’t even feel immediately. The accumulation.
Freya Butcher, the medical engineering PhD leading parts of the project, rejects simple fixes. Helmets aren’t the answer. Changing rules isn’t either. If you alter one variable in a contact sport, players compensate elsewhere, often with different injuries.
“Looking at what happens in the men’s.game doesn’t mean we understand the impact on women.”
This isn’t just sexism. It’s bad science. In 2020 an audit showed just 6% of sports science research focuses specifically on females. In 2023, nine out of ten lead authors were men. Women made up 13% of contributors.
The gender gap isn’t closing. It is yawning.
Beyond the Head
The study looks deeper than head trauma.
It evaluates musculoskeletal health through the lens of menstruation. Strength. Fatigue. And breast health, which remains a taboo.
Players often suffer bruises to their chests and sides after games. Fifteen minutes of silence follows any mention of it. No one checks those injuries. But Butcher points out a terrifying possibility: compression and impact might affect future lactation. Breastfeeding.
There is no adequate protective wear. No strategy.
Just pain that no one asks about.
The Result
At Cardiff Arms Park the data flowed in via Bluetooth from personal mouthguards. The study team watched tablet screens tracking tooth impact to infer brain trauma. Cardiff smashed Swansea 81-0. Two visitors quit due to injury.
But for the participants, the immediate joy of victory was tempered by balance tests and memory quizzes. They had to link the thrash on the pitch to the scan data from days before.
Did the game hurt them? We’ll know by 2026, when the paper titled Towards Precise Brain Health Guidelines for Women’s Rugby drops.
Until then we look at the stats from the men. Rugby players have a 14 percent higher risk of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy for every additional year played. Dementia rates rise. In 202 over 300 former players sued the major unions in a case that drags on, seeking damages for brains damaged by the ball.
Does the same path await women?
Cleo would take any injury for the team. Her best friends are rugby friends. The environment accepts her.
Ffion thinks of the future. Daughters she might have. She hopes they step onto the pitch knowing the ground is safer than it is for her. She wants them to feel okay.
It is a nice hope.
The data hasn’t landed yet. The helmets are off. The brains are still exposed.
Will the numbers match the fear?
Who knows.
