My dad has a saying "life isn't fair".

Equality is necessary to the extent that everyone has essential nutrients and equality is important to the extent that everyone has a decent level of safety. But absolute equality is impossible to achieve, so it should be pretty obvious that equality should only be an ideal to some extent.

Beyond some point equality is actually unnecessary; different people need different kinds of resources and benefits. Indigenous people of the Amazon don't need to be educated in the same way that a German requires. In other cases equality is actually a problem. In ecological systems, diversity is stability, monocultures are negligible rare. I believe the same holds for people. We naturally diversify, we distribute work, and if there's some valuable, unexploited niche, some one will eventually find it. It's somewhat easy to exterminate diversity, but it's hard to avoid diversifying.

So in many cases, equality is unnecessary and/or a hindrance. In such cases fairness is more important than equality. But our basic needs qualifying for equal rights are necessarily more urgent than any and all cases where fairness triumphs equality. There's a rather simple explanation for this. Equality should guard only things paramount for human life, fairness takes over beyond that. Since the foundations of life is inherently more important than any problem that arises from life, the things that equality should guard is necessarily more important.

Fairness is trying to put two things together that don't go. Equality is giving everyone a chance at fairness with no prejudice on how they were born. We can't force fairness on the world, or not as easy as we could force equality I should say.