The Rugby Football League has confirmed it is drawing up plans for a Women's Super League.
A formal launch will be held in the summer to bring together elite teams from the women's game into a streamlined, professionally-run competition run alongside the men's Super League.
Teams which now operate as community clubs will be formally allied to men's Super League outfits, although the players will remain amateur.
The move has the backing of Sport England, which this week announced a grant of over $AU20 million over the next four years to the RFL to aid attempts to attract more women, as well as black, Asian and minority ethnic, players into the game after it was revealed that 93 per cent of the current total of 95,000 are male.
The project is being led by Sarah-Jane Gray, who took up the role of director of development and public affairs with the RFL in November.
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"The women's game has been growing but only by modest amounts and we wanted to see a big lever to kick it on," she said.
"We were already committed to this and it was one of the pillars of the RFL's submission to Sport England, who are very supportive of it."
The aim is to introduce Super League fixtures within the existing women's league later this year as part of a four-year road map which will see six to eight teams competing at a formal level in 2018, gradually building up to a full-blown 12-team Super League by 2021.
Clubs will be expected to come under the umbrella of their local professional clubs' brands and Gray says Leeds are among the Super League clubs to have pledged their commitment for 2018.
Organisers are also in talks with Sky Sports about providing television coverage.
