During the National Bar Association conference that took place on the 22nd of August, 2022, Chimamanda Adichie questioned the discrepancy between the earnings of the NBA men’s football team winners and their female counterparts.
The winning male team is rewarded 500k, while the female 200k. This issue was brought to attention and resulted in the raising of the sum of 4 million Naira for the female team.
Chimamanda is widely known for being a female advocate, especially in her writings and this to her was just another case of “we should all be feminist”.
This act has resulted in an uproar and her advocacy has been referred to as grossly sentimental. Her actions have caused a chain reaction that exonerates the status quo of payment she spoke against. Online protesters have risen against this gynocentric act, questioning “how much revenue female sports develop in TV licenses?”
Judgements should be passed based on equity before gender equality. The male teams where the sport is concerned do not only generate more revenues, most times they go through the most rigorous competition.
In this particular case, the females had just two teams that generated 200k with their registration fee and faced off in a single round. The males had 20 teams that generated 2 million with their registration fee and the finalist had to go through a series of six matches.
In this regard, equity was neglected. If truly equality and not dominance is the goal of feminism, then it should be “equality earned” not one unfairly distributed. There are sects which include fashion and modelling where women earn higher and men do not clamour for equality because the females have earned their pay.
The clap back to Adiche’s criticism is duly justified as she ignored the math behind the ratio apportioning of financial reward to the teams. While feminism is a sound theory to practise, advocates should be context sensitive.
