PLAYING organised team sports such as football can help females develop leadership skills needed for success in later life.

Data from research released on Thursday showed participation in team sports as a child helped build collaborative skills, confidence and resilience while also aiding capacity to seek and understand feedback.

The research, which was commissioned by the AFL and business software supplier Atlassian, also found that females dropped out of sport at an earlier age than men, leaving them at a significant disadvantage when it came to developing social, communication and leadership skills.

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"Playing team sports as a child and continuing to be engaged as you develop gives you the kind of skills you need to be successful in the future," said Aubrey Blanche, Atlassian's head of global diversity and inclusion.

Blanche said it was critical young females had role models.

"What we see is that in traditional male-dominated fields, women often lack role models. It makes everything so much harder, as you just don't see anyone like you there," she said.

Blanche said sport had the power to create opportunities, and was impressed with how the fledgling NAB AFL Women's competition had started "galvanising girls" via its inclusive approach and the emergence of role models.

She said the "momentum behind" AFLW and the "excitement" it had created were positives.

The AFL's 2017 participation data showed a 76 per cent increase in the number of women's teams, with 463,364 women and girls playing some form of Australian Football. Females made up 30 per cent of overall AFL participation figures last year.

"We know that participating in sport delivers very strong personal, social and community benefits, and that if girls can see role models at the elite and leadership level, they are more likely to believe they too, can make it," the AFL's head of female football Nicole Livingstone said. 

"The existence of our national league shows this in practice – our participation numbers at the grassroots level have soared since the AFLW arrived."

The research project, titled 'The Imagination Gap', was conducted last December, with 1002 people across Australia taking part in an online survey.