Women and girls face double the risk of concussion and developing brain injuries from playing sport, but the issue is largely being ignored, British MPs have been told. Dr Willie Stewart, a consultant neuropathologist at the University of Glasgow and a leading researcher into brain injuries in sport, said he had growing concerns over the potential long-term consequences for women and called for urgent research. “A lot of the research has gone on into male elite sport and not so much on female elite sport,” he told the digital, culture, media and sport select committee. “What does concern me is that while the rules for women’s and men’s football are exactly the same, the risk of concussion in women’s football is about twice that as men’s football. So the risk of brain injury is double. That repeats itself through rugby and various other sports where the rules are also the same. “So we definitely have a concern about what the long-term consequences of that might be. If you’re twice as high risk of developing symptomatic brain injury, what does that mean many years down the line?” Professor Craig Ritchie, of the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, warned MPs there was a difference in approach to the mechanisms and management of injuries between boys and girls sports which he said were “quite startling”. He said: “It asks questions of whether we are focusing attention in the right place. If a school or club has a physio or doctor available on a Saturday afternoon, and there are a couple of matches on, they should be standing on the sidelines of the ladies game because that’s where the brain injury is going to happen. But inevitably what they’re doing is standing on the sidelines of the men’s game. I don’t think we’re giving this nearly enough attention.” Stewart, who sits on World Rugby’s independent concussion advisory group, said: “One of the things that disappoints in professional rugby is the concussion, the brain injury level, is about one brain injury a match. England Rugby has been very good at monitoring the level of brain injury and that level of one brain injury a match has stayed the same for four or five years now and that’s an unacceptably high level. “One in 30 players going off for a brain injury a match is totally unacceptable. The only way they can adjust this meaningfully is if there is any head contact that is not allowed.” Stewart also criticised football’s trials of permanent concussion substitutes and said it should have followed rugby’s model of temporary substitutes while a player’s head injury is assessed. “Football has a habit, whenever it is forced to develop, of going out on their own and trying to develop something unique to everybody else as if the problem never occurred before,” he said. “What football has introduced is a shambles.”