It's rugby time again! Yes, the Six Nations tournament has started, pubs are revelling in showing the matches on the big screen and selling lots of beer.

But wait. It's not just the rugby-playing men of England, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales who are taking to the pitches right now. It's also the rugby-playing women, featuring the English world champions (let's take a moment to remember how well the Six Nations did at the Rugby World Cup last year, shall we?).

On Saturday I turned on the television well over an hour before the first match began. Viewers were treated to tons of analysis, player interviews and pundits making their predictions. The papers are packed with more analysis, even though there's only three matches each weekend. Can Eddie Jones deliver? Will Dan Biggar's ankle get better by Saturday? Can Italy up their game?

Particularly since writing for the Rugby World Cup last year I rather like rugby. It's a skillful, exciting sport and a lot can happen in 80 minutes on a pitch. While I'm not going to suddenly take the sport up - but there are plenty of girls who might want to try it out. As usual, they don't get the opportunity to see their role models in action, or even read about them in the news.

Do a Google news search for "six nations" and you get 3,400,000 results. Do a Google news search for "women's six nations" and you get 11,300 results. In other words, the proportion of articles which come up when you add 'women's' is less than 0.4 per cent of the total when you don't. Granted this is a very unscientific test - articles about the women's game should appear in the main search too.

I can find one article about the women's game on the rugby page of the Daily Mail, a profile of England no 8 Sarah Hunter. The Guardian has a grand total of seven stories this year on their women's rugby union page, with the only Six Nations match report focusing on England's 32-0 drubbing of Scotland. I can't find anything about the women on The Independent's rugby page, or on The Telegraph's rugby or Six Nations pages. There's nothing on The Sun either. The BBC has at least covered England's selection for their next match. Frankly, it's depressing.

So if you want to know what actually happened in the women's matches, it looks as though the official site is the best bet. They've got a useful round-up of the action from the weekend; France beat Italy 39-0, Ireland beat Wales 21-3, and England capped it all off with that 32-0 victory over Scotland.

As a side-note, it's difficult to see how this situation can improve unless someone - such as Six Nations lead sponsor RBS - puts some money behind women's rugby and starts pushing it more in the print and broadcast media. The old "nobody watches/reads it, so there's no point showing it/writing about it" doesn't really hold water in my book; Newton and the women's boat race proves that to be false.

You need to make the coverage for people to consume. In today's media-saturated world, nobody except a handful of die-hard fans are going to spend hours searching for the few articles they can get their hands on. To make women's rugby more accessible to a wider audience, you've got to push it a bit and cover the matches in more detail. It's possible that the rugby sevens at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games will help, where there is a women's competition as well as a men's. Perhaps that will finally get a bit of exposure.