“Left-behind” girls in rural China, whose parents have moved from their hometown in search of work in cities and towns, have a smaller chance of attending school than their male counterparts, due, in part, to a long-held perception that men are entitled to more privileges than women, according to a recent research.

The Annual Report on Left-behind Girls in China’s Rural Areas (2016), issued on Wednesday by the China Social Welfare Foundation, found that 78.9 percent of parents in villages are inclined to bring their sons with them to bigger cities for better education. In addition, when they only have finances to pay for one child’s higher education, 97.5 percent of them would choose sons over daughters.

China’s compulsory basic education system waives most fees for elementary and middle schools, resulting in 96.1 percent of girls in rural areas attending school from ages 6 to 11. However, only 79.3 percent have access to high school education when they are aged 15 to 17, the research found.

“Dear Mom and Dad, please do not treat me and my brother differently. When my brother does something well, he gets rewarded. What about me? No reward at all. Even when I do something well, you will say, ‘This is not good enough, it should have been done better’,” one girl wrote on a questionnaire issued by the research team.

Liu Yan, of the foundation, said that when his team first started the research, they thought they could draw parallels between left-behind girls and girls in poverty.

“I was wrong. There is no such correlation. Financially, they can be doing fine. What makes their situation different is the lack of parenting. They crave their parents’ love, just like any child, but they do not have it,” Liu said.

“Some girls are told money means happiness, so they associate making money with being happy, but no one tells them why. That situation can easily drive young girls in the wrong direction,” he added.

Yuan Guilin, a professor at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s International Research and Training Center for Rural Education, described left-behind girls as the “underdogs of underdogs”.

“The organization has found a good angle to help the girls, by paying attention to details like whether they put on underwear, what they eat and drink, and how fairly they feel they are being treated,” Yuan said.

China does not intend to introduce a “flood irrigation” type of strong stimulus plan and should avoid new excessive capacities and redundant construction projects, said a senior official of the country’s top economic planner.

“Some people might have confused the definition of total fixed assets investment and the concept of ‘investment stimulus plan’,” the National Development and Reform Commission’s secretary-general, Li Pumin, said at a news conference on Wednesday.

Li made the remarks amid vigorous discussion, and even skepticism, about the widely reported, massive amount of fixed asset investment set as targets by 23 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions for this year. The targets were recently released.

Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that China’s fixed asset investment rose by 7.9 percent to 60.65 trillion yuan ($8.82 trillion) last year. In the meantime, the country was giving priority to the implementation of step-by-step reform to boost consumer or investment demand in the short term to stimulate economic growth.

“At such a growth pace, the figure might exceed 65 trillion yuan by the end of 2017 – larger than the media’s prediction,” Li said.

Unlike the stimulus package that China leveraged to anchor the economy years ago, investments in fixed assets will boost economic development in a healthy and steady way and will promote social harmony and stability, Li said.

He added that fixed asset investment is the summation of investment from different sources including the government, nongovernment organizations and foreign investors.

It refers to the “aggregation” rather than the “increment” of investment, Li said. By contrast, an “investment stimulus plan” is only applied when a country takes the initiative to increase the size of governmental investment to stimulate domestic demand and stabilize growth, he said.

The comments followed Li’s elaboration at a news conference on the country’s 13th five-year plan for a modern transportation system worth at least 2.6 trillion yuan. In addition to the huge investment target, China has set goals to extend the railway network by 30,000 kilometers, more than 30 percent of which will be high-speed railway, add 320,000 km of roads and build more than 50 new civil airports.

He Jingtong, a business professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, said that in the long run, China’s growth will be less capital intensive and investment driven, indicating that government decision-makers will increasingly evaluate projects based on their economic, environmental and operational efficiency.

“Overall, the modernization of China’s transportation and infrastructure development will gradually push local governments as well as domestic and international companies to pursue quality projects and market high value-added products and services in China while creating new competition,” He said.