However, the number of women playing football was still small compared with men, according to the survey. Of the total 900,000 Australians who played the sport recreationally, only 16 per cent were women.

While netball, not surprisingly, is played predominantly by women (89 per cent), touch footy (38 per cent), basketball (29 per cent), and soccer (23 per cent) all had a greater proportion of women players than football.

"The NAB AFL Women's Competition has played a key role in contributing to an outstanding increase in football participation," said AFL General Manager of Game Development Andrew Dillon.

According to the AFL's own data, released in February, the proportion of females playing footy is higher – up 14 per cent on the previous year. The league says one in three players are girls or women, or a total of 530,000.

The AFL data includes professional players as well as children who play Australian rules in schools, which the Ausplay data does not.

Shona MacInnes, General Manager of Business and Projects and former Women's Football Club Development Officer of the Victorian Amateur Football Association, firmly believes elite-level representation has encouraged women to play Australian rules at the community level.

"The AFLW did and does have an impact on our competition. Girls are seeing it on telly and wanting to give it a try," she said.

MacInnes recalled that local local clubs in the VAFA noticed a surge in participation in women's teams in March 2017, coinciding with the start of the AFLW.

"Over that month of March in that first year when the AFLW started, all the clubs reported the numbers really took off, and I think that was the result of the AFLW being really high prevalence," she said.

However, the Ausplay data also shows that from a young age, girls are still outnumbered by boys at least three-to-one. The widest gap was in the five- to eight-year-old age range, when nearly six boys to every one girl played.

There was a similar gap for soccer and cricket, and the reverse for netball. Even basketball, the group sport with the smallest gender gap, was played by nearly twice as many boys than girls after the age range of five to eight years.

There has been an increase in the number of Australians participating in physical activity since the start of the Ausplay survey in 2016, from 59.9 per cent of the population then to 63 per cent in 2018.

Sports Australia CEO Kate Palmer said while this was a welcome rise, solving Australia's inactivity crisis requires generational change.

"It's a small step in the right direction, but we're still falling a long way behind when it comes to meeting recommended physical activity guidelines," she said.

"Our general lifestyles are becoming more sedentary than ever before because of things such as technological advances, so that makes it critically important to find dedicated time for sport and physical activity in our lives.

"We need to move more and our lives depend on it."