A Nigerian design company has created a web app that calculates a virtual monetary value of women, sparking outcry from readers.
Based on factors such as skin colour, skin condition, nationality, spoken accent and level of education, the website, Brideprice.com.ng, quantifies a price tag for a woman.
Stylist.co.uk tested the website and after a series of questions, which also asks users to rank 'facial beauty' and 'leg shape', users are given a score and description, such as: "Super Premium Babe! Your bride price is going to cause a war in this Africa" (pictured above).
Anakle, the company behind the website, told African technology news website Human Ipo that the app "should not be taken seriously" and that it "was a joke the company had not planned to launch and was not planning to take any further".
However, the website is still live and a petition to pull it down is underway on Change.org.
The petition reads, "The Bridepricecheck app promotes racism, sexism, discrimination against women. By assigning a price tag it devalues the true worth of a woman; it promotes the ideology that women are the lesser gender, and are expected to please men.
"The app assigns a lesser monetary value for having darker skin and a greater value for being mixed-race/ lighter. The app assigns greater value for being tall, having no tribal marks, and deducts value for having a particular accent. It even goes as far as limiting the level of ambition and education women are expected to have (by deducting monetary value for women who obtain a PhD degree).
"This is not in anyway different from the mentality that the terrorist group Boko Haram have towards women, and how they have demonstrated this with the kidnapping of over 200 Chibok school girls."
On 14 April, more than 200 schoolgirls, mostly aged between 16 and 18 who were taking their final year exams in the town of Chibok, were abducted by Islamist militant group Boko Haram, who are said to be against the education of women.
Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, threatened to "sell" the students, saying they should not have been in school in the first place, but rather should get married.
The girls are still thought to be held in the Sambisa forest, a remote and inaccessible area of country and 53 have reportedly managed to escape.
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