Although the IRB produce a complex and continually updated ranking for men's international rugby they do not compile any ranking system for the women's game. Rugby statistician Serge Piquet has produced a currently unofficial, but generally accepted, world ranking, but where rankings are referred to by some boards these will normally be the finishing positions in the previous Women's Rugby World Cup (which only takes place every four years and will only include those countries that qualified for the finals).
The IRB's seedings for each World Cup are also influenced by positions in the previous tournament, but not entirely decided by them. The table below shows the final positions for the 2010 tournament and is therefore the closest thing to an "official" IRB ranking:
| Rank | 2010 position |
|---|---|
| 1 | New Zealand |
| 2 | England |
| 3 | Australia |
| 4 | France |
| 5 | United States |
| 6 | Canada |
| 7 | Ireland |
| 8 | Scotland |
| 9 | Wales |
| 10 | South Africa |
| 11 | Kazakhstan |
| 12 | Sweden |
Famous quotes containing the words women, union, results and/or summary:
“There are some women ... in whom conscience is so strongly developed that it leaves little room for anything else. Love is scarcely felt before duty rushes to encase it, anger impossible because one must always be calm and see both sides, pity evaporates in expedients, even grief is felt as a sort of bruised sense of injury, a resentment that one should have grief forced upon one when one has always acted for the best.”
—Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978)
“Every good cause gained a victory when the Union troops were triumphant. Our final victory was the triumph of religion, of virtue, of knowledge.... During those four years, whatever our motives, whatever our lives, we were fighting on God’s side. We were doing His work. What would this country have been if we had failed?”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence.... It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one’s rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)