Over 1,000 netizens Sunday signed a joint letter saying they would boycott this year's Spring Festival gala citing what they said was "discriminatory" content against female.

The netizens, most of whom are women's rights activists, called on China's media regulator to require China Central Television (CCTV) to stop broadcasting programs with discriminatory messages.

In a letter submitted to the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, they demanded an apology from the gala's production team and CCTV.

The letter said that at least 44 sections of the gala, including performers' lines and characters, were found to have mocked single women, female civil servants, short people and full-time mothers.

Zheng Churan, one of the signatories of the letter, told the Global Times on Tuesday that "we signed this letter because we found that most Chinese people lack an awareness of their rights, especially women. They do not realize that such cultural events could have a very bad impact on the social status of women."

The annual Spring Festival gala is one of the world's most watched TV programs. Over 700 million people watched the gala in 2014.

They also asked the media regulator to rectify other discriminatory and insulting content that mocks people's gender, age, height and physical disabilities in other entertainment programs.

Feng Yuan, a women's rights advocate and co-founder of Equality, an NGO that focuses on gender issue, said this joint letter has turned private criticism between friends into public action, which could raise public awareness of women's rights and should be encouraged. 

"Messages contained in the programs such as comparing girls to "second-hand goods" and describing single women as 'leftover' have hurt many people and they feel discriminated against," said Feng, adding that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women stipulates that language that discriminates against women should be eliminated.

However, a survey on news portal netease.com showed that 23,071 of 33,184 netizens said that they did not regard these programs as discriminatory and the advocates were reading too much into it, as of press time. However, 7,859 agreed  that the gala contained discriminatory messages.