The Women's T20I Scoring Revolution: What 584 Innings of Our Own Data Show
Everyone senses the women's game is changing. Almost nobody has put numbers on it. We hold ball-by-ball records for 290 women's T20 internationals, and they show a scoring rise that is, season for season, moving faster than the men's game did.
The story of women's cricket over the past five years is usually told through moments. A sold-out final. A record broadcast audience. A new league. All true, and all difficult to measure.
The part almost nobody quantifies is what has happened on the field. So we did, using our own ball-by-ball records for 290 completed women's T20 internationals between 2020 and 2026.
The result is a scoring revolution that is smaller in absolute terms than the men's game, but is arriving faster, and is showing up in exactly the places you would expect if the sport is genuinely levelling up.
The headline: nineteen runs an innings in five years
In 2021, the average women's T20I innings in our data produced 122.1 runs at a run rate of 6.57 per over. In 2026, the average innings produced 141.2 runs at 7.83 per over.
That is plus 19.1 runs per innings, and a run rate up 1.26 per over, in five seasons. In percentage terms the run rate has risen about 19 percent.
For comparison, our IPL data shows the men's league run rate rising roughly 29 percent across thirteen seasons. The women's game has produced two thirds of that gain in a little over a third of the time. On a per-season basis, women's T20I scoring is accelerating at least as quickly as the men's franchise game did, and arguably faster.
The shape of the change
The rise is not a straight line. Scoring was essentially flat, even slightly declining, from 2021 to 2023: 122.1, then 125.5, then 120.5. Then it jumped sharply in 2024 and has risen in every season since: 135.0, then 139.3, then 141.2.
The 2023 to 2024 change is the single biggest move in the data: plus 14.5 runs per innings, with the run rate jumping from 6.46 to 7.27. Something shifted, and it shifted quickly.
The big totals tell the clearest story
League averages are blunt instruments. The frequency of large totals is far more revealing, because it shows whether the ceiling is moving or just the floor.
Innings of 180 or more, by season: 2021, one. 2022, six. 2023, five. 2024, eight. 2025, twelve. 2026, sixteen.
Innings of 200 or more: none at all in 2020, 2021 or 2022. Then two in 2023, two in 2024, six in 2025, and four in 2026.
Read that again, because it is the heart of this article. Before 2023, a 200 total had not happened once in our women's T20I records. Since then it has happened fourteen times.
The highest totals have moved just as clearly. The best we hold from 2021 is 184. By 2023 it is 213, by 2025 it is 221, and by 2026 it is 237.
This is what a genuine step change looks like. It is not that weak teams stopped collapsing. It is that the strongest teams found a gear that did not previously exist.
What plausibly changed
Our data can date the shift precisely. It cannot prove why, so what follows is interpretation, clearly labelled.
Professional leagues arrived. The Women's Premier League began in 2023, joining the Hundred and the WBBL. The timing of our 2024 scoring jump, one season after the WPL's first edition, is consistent with a cohort of players getting sustained exposure to high-pressure T20 batting alongside the world's best.
Full-time contracts changed preparation. More boards moved to professional contracts across this period. Power hitting is largely a function of strength, technique and repetition, all of which respond to full-time training.
A generation raised on T20. The players now entering international cricket grew up watching and playing T20 as a primary format rather than adapting to it late.
More cricket. Our data shows the volume of women's T20Is rising sharply, from 15 innings in our 2020 sample to well over a hundred in recent seasons. More matches means faster learning.
The caveat we will not hide
There is a genuine complication in these numbers, and ignoring it would be dishonest.
Women's T20I cricket has expanded rapidly to include many newer and developing nations. Those teams often post low totals while they build their programmes, and every one of those innings drags the league average down. That means the averages here understate how much the leading teams have improved. The rise you see is happening in spite of a widening pool, not because of a narrowing one.
It also means you should treat the league average as a measure of the whole sport's health rather than of elite standards. If we restricted this analysis to the top eight nations, we would expect the trend to look steeper still. That is analysis we intend to publish once our team-level splits are ready, and we would rather promise it than fake it now.
What our data does and does not cover
Our ball-by-ball records for women's T20 internationals begin in 2020, so this article covers 2020 to 2026 and cannot speak to the years before that. Anyone telling you what women's T20I scoring did in 2015 is not using our numbers.
We also hold complete ball-by-ball records for the women's T20 World Cup, and headline scorecards for women's one-day internationals.
One thing we deliberately do not do in this article is quote individual career totals. Our own player career records for the women's game currently begin part-way through many careers, which means a career runs total from our database would be lower than the true figure. Publishing it as though it were complete would mislead you. We are building a separate, verified lifetime-career layer for exactly this reason, and until it is ready we restrict ourselves to team and match figures we can fully stand behind.
That is a slower way to write cricket articles. It is the only way we are willing to do it.
The bottom line
Across the women's T20 international innings in our data, the average score has risen from 122 to 141 in five seasons, the run rate has climbed 19 percent, and the 200 total has gone from something that had never happened to something that happens several times a year.
The change dates to 2024, one year after professional franchise leagues reached critical mass, and it is happening while the number of competing nations grows, which makes it more impressive rather than less.
The women's game is not slowly catching up to the men's scoring curve. It is climbing its own curve, and doing it faster.