I'm a journalist. I love a good quote, anecdote and observation. But in the past few years I've learned that data can provide some of the best stories.

And in the argument for improving women's representation in sport I think data is a key tool. So before I start looking into the problems I wanted to pick out a few of the key stats to prove there is a real issue, before I start examining how one might solve it.

England

Sport England carries out regular surveys of participation in sport and it's all available on their website including a great analysis tool which enables you to analyse the data. I did a bit of digging on overall gender participation over the time they've been doing the survey and also looked at some of the most popular sports. In all these charts women are the orange line and men the blue and the percentages are the proportion of the population participating in the sport at least once a month (ie not very often).

Overall participation in sport

This is a sobering chart for men and women because it shows little improvement since the first survey nine years ago.But male participation has increased by 1.5 percentage points while female participation has dropped 0.4 percentage points - so whatever efforts have been made to get more women exercising, they've failed.

Swimming

My first sport, and of the four most popular sports in England, the only one which is more popular among women (hurrah). Unfortunately participation in swimming generally is dropping off, and it's dropping off faster among women than men - the 6.7 percentage point difference between the genders in 2006 has narrowed to just 4.2 percentage points this year.

Athletics

Running is a cheap sport which anyone can do. Buy some trainers and leave home. And it's growing in popularity, but at a similar rate among men and women.

Cycling

Lots of us cycle to work and I'm sure I've seen more women cycling in London these past few years. Sadly that isn't reflected nationally, although the trend is better for women than men the past two years. A couple of other stats to throw in here related to the two mass-participation sportives I cycled in this year. In France, 751 women signed up for L'Etape du Tour 2015, a gruelling stage of the Tour du France, out of a total registrant number of 15,010 cyclists - or 5 per cent of those taking part. Around 400 women finished out of a total of, from memory, around 10,000 cyclists (it was tough).

At Ride London-Surrey 100 2015 5,017 women finished. But so did 20,550 men, meaning women represented 19.5 per cent of participants. Good. But far from equal.

Football

Football is one of the UK's biggest exports. If you travel to somewhere distant where British tourists are relatively uncommon, Manchester United is one of the first things the locals will seize on to identify you - but that's another story. For the purposes of Fair Play, the key fact is that it's an utterly male-dominated sport. I want to look into this more in the future.

Gym

In 2006 the proportion of English men and women going to the gym at least once a month was pretty equal, but the stats show that while more men are going to the gym, less women are.

Rowing

My main sport, and a minority sport with 192,000 people taking part regularly at the last count, but one where male and female participation is actually not too different. I plan to write more about rowing in due course as I think there are some really interesting things going on at the moment.

Olympics

I mentioned in my introductory post that women represented 44 per cent of athletes at the London 2012 Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has actually been making a good effort to improve the number of women competing at the Olympics and the Paralympics in the 115 years since women first participated - 22 women competed in tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism and golf in 1900 in Paris.

All sports wanting to be included at the Olympics have to have women's events now. Hurrah! Nevertheless, although events for women now represent 46 per cent of all Olympic events women are still a minority and with some countries only sending male athletes I'm not sure if true parity is something which will be achieved in the next couple of Olympiads. In fact at the Winter Olympics events in which women compete did represent 50 per cent of all events, but women only represented 40.3 per cent of competitors in Sochi 2014.

Conclusion

This is just a sample of statistics. In a future post about Title IX in the US I'll look at their data separately.

Yet the overall picture is pretty depressing. In England it seems clear that no progress has been made in persuading women to participate in sport in the last 10 years. In the developed world we do, undeniably, have a health and obesity crisis and exercise is a good way to try and deal with that. That over half of England's women don't participate in any sport regularly is a fact, the statistics show it. In blogs to come I want to look at what's being done to combat that, as well as why I think the media has to admit some blame for the problem.