One of the women marching for gender equality by freeing their nipples.

With 20,000 Facebook attendees, "Free the nipple" was set to be one of the biggest gender equality marches in Auckland.

As it turned out however, nipple freedom was not such a big issue with only 13 people turning out for Saturday's Aotea Square event.

Three women freed their nipples and four men took their shirts off. Two spray-painted flags read "Free the nipple" and "Equality".

The Free The Nipple event was organised towards the beginning of the year on Facebook with 20,000 people saying they were going.

Organiser Jenelle Chitty said she was disappointed at the turn out and she thought people must not have taken their plight seriously.

"I feel like we need to kind of just put this out there and be like, this is a serious thing. Like, we are being completely real about this. Like, we're still going to do the walk, we'll still go for a walk through town."

Chitty said they were raising awareness about gender inequality and pushing to try and remove the stigma around women's nipples.

"I really want women to be able to feel confident to walk out and to take off their tops this summer though and not feel like they're going to get yelled at or abused for it. We don't want the backlash, we don't to be slut shamed."

Being such a complex issue, she said there were many different sides to it and she wanted to achieve "so many things" with the march.

"My main thing is this is for men as well because at the end of the day, we're all convinced that men are perverts because they look at our tits. And it's like, we look at their tits. We're not perverts.

"We look at them topless and we're not perverts," Chitty said.

"In five years to come when this is literally a normal thing and people are like just walking around looking at each other it's not going to be like 'ew you f...ing pervert don't look at my tits' kind of thing ya know."

Now, she said, nothing would stop her from taking her top off.

"I'm so completely fine, as soon as I took it off I'm just like, yeah this is fine, this is completely sweet, there's no issue I don't even feel weird right now. Like this is so normal now, this is really weird like," Chitty said.