Women Rugby Ranking - a proposal

A proposal for a worldwide ranking of women unions based on IRB criteria

Since the IRB does not have an official ranking for female rugby, I tried, using the criteria of the board to calculate one.
I took into consideration only the last 3 years, i.e. from Jan 2010 and gave to the unions a starting number of points based on historical data.
Using the IRB calculations I navigated my way through the rankings and once reached a final ladder, I excluded unions that have in period played less than 3 games or do not have played any test match since Jan 2011. This e.g. excludes Australia, which has an overall ranking of 42.85 points, equivalent to 5 in the ranking, but has not played since the final for third place at the world cup 2010.

The up-to-date ranking can be found at this page


Here the results:

Position	Union	Points	Previous
1	England	48.975
2	New Zealand	48.475
3	Ireland	43.79
4	France	43.35
5	Canada	39.25
6	United States	38.075
7	Wales	37.79
8	Spain	35.545
9	South Africa	34.99
10	Italy	34.77
11	Scotland	31.785
12	Kazakhstan	30.11
13	Hong Kong	28.925
14	Russia	28.86
15	Belgium	27.015
16	Netherlands	25.72
17	Sweden	24.655
18	Japan	24.09
19	Thailand	22.91
20	China	21.35
21	Uganda	20.12
22	Singapore	20.015
23	Kenya	19.88
24	Philippines	18.03
25	Finland	17.825
26	Laos	13.96

As all rankings could be made better and can disappoint someone, but I think overall it's not a bad reflection of the current status of women rugby.

I sent it to the IRB, let's see what their feedback.