WATERBURY -- Nasya Quinonez, 13, has long wanted to be a teacher or doctor. She has a cousin in nursing.

"I like helping people, and now many of my cousins work at the hospital," Quinonez said.

Quinonez was among about 100 girls from Waterbury middle schools gathered at Naugatuck Valley Community College on Friday for a daylong forum on career opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math, also known generally as "STEM" fields. The girls-only event is part of the college's attempt to draw women into careers that continue to be dominated by men.

This fall, women account for only 134, or 21 percent, of the 645 students signed up in STEM majors at the two-year college.

NVCC is hardly alone in this disparity. While women make up about half the U.S. workforce, they make up less than 25 percent of workers in STEM fields, according to a 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Only about one in seven engineers are female.

The gender scales at NVCC shift if nursing is factored. Seventy-four percent of 1,317 students enrolled in pre-nursing courses at NVCC are female.

Peter S. Angelastro, head of NVCC's STEM majors, said the college is trying to get more women involved in the "hard sciences" and manufacturing. He believes the problem stems from perception. Nursing has long been considered a women's field, the other STEM fields the province of men.

According to Angelastro, studies show that to engage girls in math and science fields, their interest really needs to be germinated no later than in middle school.

NVCC President Daisy Cocco De Filippis said she is starting to see a shift after decades in the education field, but there's still a long way to go.

"I think it's still waiting to come up because it's still mostly male," De Filippis said.

Each girl arriving at Friday's event got a STEM T-shirt and a pair of safety glasses. The day began with pep talks from De Filippis and U.S. Rep. Elizabeth H. Esty, D-5th District.

Esty said the nation needs to access the full potential of its workforce. That means giving young women a shot in STEM fields. She also spoke about Waterbury-born astronaut Rick Mastracchio, who picked up a second master's degree while repeatedly applying to the NASA program.

"He's proof you can do whatever you want," Esty said. "We need you to learn these skills, don those glasses and make it happen."

The girls built contraptions of paper, tape and balloons for an egg-drop experiment, and also visited seminars by various NVCC staff and other volunteers.

Friday's participants were all members of a federally funded college-preparation partnership between Waterbury's public schools, the Smaller Manufacturers Association, GEAR-Up and NVCC. It was sponsored by the college, its Starbase program and the Connecticut Women's Education and Legal Fund.

In Professor Nerendra Sharma's mechanical engineering classroom, teams of girls competed to build the tallest structures using thread, tape, dry spaghetti strands and a single marshmallow.

This fall, only about 10 percent of Sharma's mechanical engineering students are female. He's not certain why.

Sharma tried to explain the financial sense of education using a salary chart. High school graduates can expect to earn $33,695. An associate degree brings $43,455 and so on. Science and math degrees are much more valuable, he said.

"I've had students graduating here making $58,000 to $60,000 a year," Sharma said. "This is my way of keeping you in school."