This year, 2 players on the Brownlow red carpet will be wearing frocks.

It seems as though the AFL are finally starting to embrace women’s football.

Last month, the first live broadcast of a women’s footy match drew more eyeballs than a men’s game held on the same night — and the league seem as though they’ll actually keep their promise to establish a women’s competition by 2017.

It’s been slow progress, but progress is being made, and it was writ large on the front cover of this morning’s Age newspaper:

Every year the men’s football stars and their partners front up to the AFL’s annual Brownlow Medal count in their formal gear to celebrate the highlight’s of the season.

Tonight (and for the first time ever), two female football stars will be the joining them on the red carpet.

Daisy Pearce and Tayla Harris have been invited along to present the awards for best goal and mark of the year, respectively.

Pearce, who is the captain of the Darebin Falcons, is herself a medal winner having taken home her sixth (and third consecutive) Helen Lambert Medal this year — the Victorian Women’s Football League equivalent of the Brownlow.

“As someone who has always loved watching the Brownlow because of the great highlights, and for the intricacies of the vote count, I was a big resounding yes to the invitation,” Pearce told the Age.

“Then, about half an hour later, I thought oh my goodness, it’s also a big fashion hullabaloo … what the hell am I going to wear?”

Off the field Pearce is a midwife, but she has recently taken on a one day a week job with the AFL as a game ambassador.

She will be taking her boyfriend — a farmer named Angus — to the ceremony tonight.

Harris says attending the Brownlow was “kind of on my bucket list” and will be taking her dad along (which I think we can all agree is bloody cute).

Unlike Pearce, she says that frocking up for the event is “right up [her] alley” and is looking forward to meeting the code’s elite coaches at the dinner.

While the inclusion of Pearce and Harris in tonight’s proceedings is a small step in recognising the talented women who play Aussie rules, it is a significant one.

At present women feature in only 7% of the of sports programming in Australia.

To put that into context we see more horse racing on TV than we do female sport — and according to a report released in April airtime has actually declined in the last ten years.

We’ve just seen our female soccer players forced to strike over unfair pay conditions — even international standard sports stars have to have second jobs because they are women.

When we still have sports commentators like Graham Cornes saying women playing footy just “doesn’t look right”, it’s going to be pretty great to see two women at AFL’s night of nights who are there because they are football stars, not just because they happen to be dating them.