Gender Gap Netherlands — A Falling Rank and a Femicide That Won't Move
The Netherlands dropped 15 places in a single year. The reason is not what most visitors expect.
NL
Gender Gap Netherlands — A Country Moving in Two Directions at Once
For most of the past two decades, the Netherlands had a comfortable story to tell about gender equality. It sat reliably in the World Economic Forum’s top 30, anchored by full educational parity and high female employment. In 2025, that story broke. The Netherlands fell fifteen places in a single year, from 28th to 43rd out of 148 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index, the sharpest one-year drop the country has recorded. The university professor who collects the Dutch data for the report did not soften the conclusion: Dutch gender equality policy needs a serious overhaul.
The fall is not really about pay, and that is the detail most coverage misses. It is about power. While the wage gap has been narrowing steadily for years, women’s representation in Dutch politics moved backward at exactly the same time, and that single shift was enough to undo a decade of gradual gains. A country can be doing better on one measure and worse overall, and the Netherlands in 2025 is the clearest example on any RYB country page so far.
This page follows the same structure as Gender Gap Finland: pay, safety, education, and power, each checked against the relevant UN target, with RYB’s role being to connect the official data, not to collect it.
Pay — SDG Target 5.4
This is the genuinely encouraging number on this page. The unadjusted gender pay gap, the average difference in gross hourly wages, fell to 10.5% in 2024, down from 19% in 2010 and from 12% just the year before. Statistics Netherlands’ own economists are careful about why: part of the narrowing reflects real progress, and part reflects the changing mix of who is in the workforce, rather than less discrimination specifically. When researchers control for age, education, and experience, the adjusted gap that remains is around 6%, a figure CBS says it cannot fully explain, which leaves real room for unconscious bias in how comparable work gets paid.
The annual income gap tells a starker story than the hourly one: women earn 32% less than men per year, almost entirely because Dutch women work far shorter hours. Only 23% of employed women work full-time, against 63% of men, the so-called Dutch part-time paradox that has defined this country’s labour market for forty years. A new EU Pay Transparency Directive will force Dutch companies with 150 or more employees to publish their pay gaps from 2027 onward, the first time disclosure will be mandatory rather than voluntary.
Power — SDG Target 5.5 and SDG 16.7
This is where the real story lives. Women held 38.7% of seats in the Dutch House of Representatives after the most recent count, a figure that had actually fallen from the year before. The WEF’s 2025 report attributes the country’s fifteen-place collapse specifically to a drop in political empowerment, the sharpest decline of any of the four measures it tracks for the Netherlands. Economic participation stayed essentially flat at a weak 74th place worldwide; political empowerment is what gave way.
Boardrooms show the same pattern from a different angle. Women hold only 28.8% of senior leadership roles despite higher average education levels, and a 2022 law requiring at least one-third of listed companies’ supervisory board seats to be held by women was a direct legislative response to how slowly this was moving on its own. SDG Target 5.5 calls for women’s full and effective participation in leadership at every level of decision-making; the Netherlands’ own data shows that target moving in the wrong direction at the political level even as boardroom quotas attempt to force progress elsewhere.
Safety — SDG Target 5.2 and SDG 16.1, and the Femicide That Won’t Move
Roughly 40 women are killed in the Netherlands every year, and that number has barely shifted in fifteen years. Statistics Netherlands found that since 2010, an average of 22 women a year have been killed specifically by a partner or ex-partner, a rate the agency describes as unchanged across a decade and a half despite everything else that has changed in Dutch gender policy in that time. More than half of all femicide victims are killed by a current or former partner; about one in five by another family member.
2025 brought the issue into the open in a way it had not been before. After a string of killings in July, including 39-year-old Joeweela, shot by her ex-husband in front of their children weeks after she had reported him for domestic violence, thousands of people marched in Rotterdam under the banner “reclaim the night.” The government’s Stop Femicide! Action Plan, adopted in 2024, aims to help police and the judiciary recognise warning signs earlier; femicide researcher Marieke Liem has documented that by the time a woman first reports domestic violence to police, an average of 33 incidents have typically already occurred.
The most recent figures, released in early 2026, offer the first cautiously hopeful sign in years: 37 women were killed in 2025, down from 44 in 2024, with partner or ex-partner killings falling from 27 to 17. Liem herself urges caution rather than celebration: “Only if that figure remains lower for two years can we truly speak of a decline.” Leaving an abusive partner remains one of the most dangerous moments for a woman at risk, which means more public attention to femicide can, in the short term, coincide with more violence rather than less, before it coincides with fewer deaths.
One in three Dutch women has experienced intimate partner violence in her lifetime, a rate above the EU average, and only about 10% of those women report it to police. Both the European Institute for Gender Equality and the Council of Europe’s monitoring body, GREVIO, have separately concluded that the Netherlands still too often treats domestic violence as a private conflict to be mediated rather than a pattern of danger to be assessed, and that the country has too few shelter places for women trying to leave. As with Finland’s safety section, it is worth saying plainly: femicide in the Netherlands is not an immigration story. Researchers are consistent that most victims are killed by someone already close to them.
Education — The Strongest Number on the Page
If pay is encouraging and power is troubling, education is simply settled. The Netherlands ranks first in the world on educational attainment, with full parity between men and women, the same top ranking Finland holds on this measure. In 2024, 38.3% of Dutch women had completed a higher education degree, against 35.7% of men, a gap that has held in women’s favour for years. Dutch girls have outperformed Dutch boys academically for a generation; the open question, as in Finland, is no longer whether women have access to education, but why that advantage has not yet translated into proportional power.
RYB’s Place in This Picture
RYB does not produce the WEF index, the CBS pay-gap monitor, or the femicide figures cited here. Statistics Netherlands, the WEF’s Dutch partner institute at the University of Amsterdam, and EIGE do that work, often querying the same government ministries directly. What RYB does is connect that work to the same global framework used everywhere else on this site. The SDGs Netherlands page tracks how the country is doing against all seventeen UN goals; this page is the deep dive into the two goals that concern women and girls specifically, the same structure used on SDGs Finland.
This is also the data a Culture Women’s Day for the Netherlands exists to surface. Visit Culture Women’s Day NL to see how this picture connects to the country’s own suffrage history and the broader Women, Culture and Peace framework RYB is built around.
World Economic Forum
Global Gender Gap Report Netherlands
2025
Rank: 43 (out of 148 countries)
Score: 0.756
› report
2024
Rank: 28 (out of 146 countries)
Score: 0.775
2023
Rank: 28 (out of 146 countries)
Score: 0.777
2021
Rank: 31 (out of 156 countries)
Score: 0.762
2020
Rank: 38 (out of 153 countries)
Score: 0.736
European Institute for Gender Equality
Gender Equality Index — Netherlands
EIGE ranks the Netherlands 3rd in the EU on its Gender Equality Index, built on six domains including a dedicated Violence domain.
› Netherlands country profile
Looking Forward
The Netherlands’ gender gap story used to be one of slow, steady progress with a known weak point: too much part-time work, not enough women at the top. 2025 complicated that story in a way nobody fully predicted. Pay is closing faster than it has in years. Femicide may, cautiously, finally be turning a corner after a decade and a half of standing still. And yet the country fell further and faster on the World Economic Forum’s overall ranking than at any point in nineteen editions of the report, because the one area assumed to be settled, women’s presence in politics, quietly slipped backward. Progress on any single measure means little if the others are not watched at the same time. That is the entire argument for tracking all of this together, on one page, rather than picking the statistic that tells the story a country would prefer to hear.
Sources
- Amsterdam Centre for Business Innovation, University of Amsterdam, “Gender equality stalls as the Netherlands drops 15 places” — acbi.uva.nl/content/news/2025/06/gender-equality-stalls-as-the-netherlands-drops-15-places.html
- NL Times, “Gender gap growing in Netherlands; Drops to 43rd place on WEF ranking” — nltimes.nl/2025/06/14/gender-gap-growing-netherlands-drops-43rd-place-wef-ranking
- Statistics Netherlands (CBS), “Gender pay gap is narrowing” — cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2025/18/gender-pay-gap-is-narrowing
- Statistics Netherlands (CBS), “Gender pay gap in private sector is narrowing” — cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2025/50/gender-pay-gap-in-private-sector-is-narrowing
- Statistics Netherlands (CBS), SDG 5: Gender Equality — cbs.nl/en-gb/visualisations/monitor-of-well-being-and-the-sustainable-development-goals/sdg-s/sdg-5-gender-equality
- Statistics Netherlands (CBS), “Number of women killed by partner or ex unchanged in 15 years” — cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2025/48/number-of-women-killed-by-partner-or-ex-unchanged-in-15-years
- NL Times, “Femicide drops, but experts warn danger remains for women leaving partners” — nltimes.nl/2026/01/10/femicide-drops-experts-warn-danger-remains-women-leaving-partners
- NL Times, “Femicide: Woman killed in Netherlands every eight days, mostly by exes, partners” — nltimes.nl/2025/07/18/femicide-woman-killed-netherlands-every-eight-days-mostly-exes-partners
- RAND Europe, “The Femicide Crisis: How the Netherlands Can Learn from the UK” — rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/10/the-femicide-crisis-how-the-netherlands-can-learn-from.html
- Erasmus University Rotterdam, “Behind closed doors: the complex reality of domestic violence” — eur.nl/en/news/behind-closed-doors-complex-reality-domestic-violence
- UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, SDG 5 Targets and Indicators — sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5#targets_and_indicators
- UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, SDG 16 Targets and Indicators — sdgs.un.org/goals/goal16#targets_and_indicators
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