The Netherlands has dropped another three places on the Global Gender Gap Index, an annual study commissioned by the World Economic Forum on gender equality. The Netherlands is now in 46th place, three spots down from last year, when the country had already dropped 15 places.

According to the ranking, the gender gap in the Netherlands is about 75 percent closed, but progress has stalled. The Netherlands keeps slipping because other countries are still making progress.

The study compared 145 countries, examining gender disparities across four areas: economic participation, access to education, health and life expectancy, and political empowerment.

The Netherlands scores best on educational attainment. The Netherlands has closed this gap entirely and ranks first in this category. Its lowest score is for political empowerment, where the gap is only 33 percent closed. The Netherlands ranked 38th in this category.

“I thought we had hit rock bottom last year,” Henk Volberda, a professor of Strategy and Innovation at the University of Amsterdam, commented to NOS. Volberda and his team analyzed the situation in the Netherlands for this global study.

The Netherlands does well in terms of education and healthcare. There’s also slight improvement in economic terms, though the Netherlands lags behind neighboring countries that are advancing much more rapidly. According to Volberda, the Netherlands would score higher if it could close the wage gap and women earned the same pay for equal work.

It would also help a lot if women held more leadership positions, especially in politics. It is this lack of progress that is behind the Netherlands’ slip “from frontrunner to laggard,” Volberda said. “Although the number of women in parliament has risen slightly, the number of women holding ministerial posts has declined. We have also never had a female Prime Minister.

Iceland leads the ranking, followed by Finland, Norway, Namibia, and the United Kingdom. Germany ranks ninth and Belgium 33rd. In 46th place, the Netherlands ranks just above countries like the United States, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belarus.