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The Netherlands has fallen further down the global ranking for equality between men and women, slipping from 43rd place last year to 46th this year, according to the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Gender Gap Index. The year before, the country had already dropped fifteen places.
Standing still while others move
The Netherlands is not, for the most part, going backwards. Rather, progress on women’s equality has come to a near standstill, and because other countries are still advancing, the Netherlands keeps sliding down the table. The index compares 145 countries across four areas: economic participation, access to education, health and life expectancy, and political influence.
On two of those, the picture is good. “In terms of access to education and healthcare, there is no longer a gap in the Netherlands. Women sometimes even score better than men, as in almost all EU countries,” said Henk Volberda, professor of strategy and innovation at the University of Amsterdam, who led the Dutch part of the research. Economically, there is also a slight improvement, though the country lags behind neighbours that are progressing faster. The Netherlands would score better, he noted, if women were paid equally for the same work and held senior positions more often.
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Politics drags it down
What pulls the ranking down most is political representation, and here Volberda’s verdict is blunt: the Netherlands has gone “from front-runner to laggard”. “Although the number of women in the House of Representatives has increased slightly, the number of women in ministerial posts has gone down,” he said. “We have also never had a female prime minister.”
The broader labour-market data reflects the same trend. From 2015 to 2026, women's share in management increased by almost three percentage points. However, the higher the position, the fewer women hold these roles, showing a persistent under-representation in the key positions that lead to becoming a company’s chief executive.
Who leads, and what could change
At the top of the ranking, the gap is smallest in Iceland, followed by Finland, Norway, Namibia and the United Kingdom; neighbouring Germany sits ninth.
Volberda argues for more proactive government policy on the issue, which currently falls under the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. “At the moment, no one in government feels responsible for this subject,” he said, noting that the education gap it was meant to address has already closed. He recommends making it easier for women to return to work after pregnancy, pointing to Scandinavian countries with free childcare and more generous maternity leave, and says he regularly hears from women who want to work more but find they are no better off financially if they do. A fairer division of caring responsibilities would help too, he suggests, along with quotas for government and senior management roles. Without such steps, the country’s slow slide down the ranking looks set to continue.