When 16-year-old Amali Harper tells people she wants to an engineer, they are usually surprised.
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She's one of only a few girls in her engineering class at Kooringal High School in Wagga, but hopes times are changing.
"I think the reason there aren't many girls involved comes down to culture and stereotypes," Ms Harper said.
"Girls think, 'oh that's a male dominated area they build the buildings and bridges', but now we're noticing those stereotypes are not real and we can break through it."
Ellie Pearce, from Newhaven College at Phillip Island, has made it her mission to encourage more of her female classmates into STEM subjects like physics and specialist mathematics.
Ms Pearce, who's known around school as the girl who wants to be an astronaut, is frustrated by the negative stereotypes on TV and film which she thinks reinforce gender roles in science.
And one of the biggest culprits is popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory.
"It's like even just in movies where the woman has to be saved by a man because she's not able to think, or work it out for herself," Ms Pearce said.
The girls are both attending the 35th National Youth Science Forum, which started this week with the arrival of 200 students from all over Australia.
"The struggle especially being rural is that there aren't many role models," Ms Pearce said
"So the biggest thing with this is you can meet like minded people."
One of those role models is professor Liesl Folks, a former attendee of the forum and now the dean of the University of Buffalo's school of engineering and applied sciences in New York.
"The forum was transformational for me it really set me on the path of studying physics," she said.
Professor Folks is a champion of getting more girls involved in STEM subjects and believes cultural forces are stopping more women being involved in applied sciences.
The expert in nanotechnology and magnetism said a lack of women involved in engineering - with only about 20-per-cent of graduates women - was not only bad for the economy, but put women at a disadvantage socially.
"We're struggling in Australia and the United states with trying to boost the number of women who come into the STEM fields," she said.
"We need more engineers coming into the field, but I also worry about it from a social justice perspective.
"If women aren't given access to these roles and opportunities, they're also locked out of very high paying and rewarding jobs."
