Tracy Brabin, Metro Mayor of West Yorkshire and Kim McGuinness, Metro Mayor of the North East have had their say after a new report details damning inequalities in health, vocation, and poverty faced by women living across the North.

The women of the North are our sisters, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, aunts, and friends. They raised us, we raise them, we care for them - and they increasingly care for us. They have defined our lives.

They also face huge challenges - their health has been neglected, they are more likely to work longer, face greater ill health, be subject to domestic violence, and give more unpaid care than men and women in other parts of the country.

Woman of the North is a report on inequality. On the increasing inequality that has been faced by women in our region over the past decade and a half. The effects of austerity, the cost-of-living crisis, economic stagnation, the pandemic and unequal funding formulas have all hit women living in the North, on average, harder than those in the rest of the country.

We expected those differences to be visible, but just how stark they are is made crystal clear in this report.

Ill health in the North means not only do women suffer more with their own physical and mental health, but also take on much more unpaid caring work. One in five (1 in 5) women aged 55-59 in the North of England provide care to a family member because of illness, disability, mental illness or substance use.

Many women in the North experience poverty from cradle to the grave, in some deprived areas life expectancy is decreasing, and as the primary carers of children their poverty underlies the blight of child poverty that we see across the region.

There are things that we can do practically as mayors around skills. Educational attainment differs for women of the North with a significant number having no qualifications, much higher than the national average and the South East in particular.

We will also work to drive the economies of our regions and that of the North collectively. But we cannot do this in isolation. Central government must act with their powers as well as ours to improve outcomes through the departments of education, health and social care and work and pensions.

As the North's two female mayors we are determined to create the infrastructure of opportunity needed to change these statistics.

But this report is not only negative. The strength and resilience of women in the region is apparent.

Their hard work through paid and unpaid labour underpins the economy of the North. Through adversity, and sometimes unbearable conditions they still manage to live, hold families and communities together and even thrive.

Imagine how much more women in the North could achieve without the constraints, so clearly illustrated here.

This report must act as a wake-up call to all of us in positions of power, that to unleash the potential of women in the North is to unleash the potential of the UK.