MONTOUR FALLS, N.Y. – After strapping on a 50-pound vest, Julie Pisanello reeled in a fire hose, hoisted two ladders, whacked a sledgehammer a dozen times against a door-like simulator, crawled through a dark maze, and dragged a 165-pound mannequin a distance of 70 feet.

The substitute schoolteacher is already a volunteer firefighter in suburban Albany. To join the mere 98 women who earn their livelihoods from firefighting in New York – a state with 20,000 career firefighters – she needs to demonstrate on-the-job dexterity.

“It’s so difficult!” Ms. Pisanello, 21, said with a gasp midway through an eight-station course set aside especially for female hopefuls on a fall weekend at the New York State Academy of Fire Science. “Keep going! You are so close, girl!” shot back an instructor watching the action.

It was when Ms. Pisanello came to the final event – wielding a pike and hook atop a 6-foot-long pole to replicate pulling down a ceiling in a burning building – that she almost buckled under the strain.

“If she even drops that pole she’ll fail,” said Fire Captain Donna Kubarycz, whispering running commentary from nearby. “She almost dropped it! She’s having a hard time right now.”

Seeking to broaden a field still dominated overwhelmingly by men, the main firefighters’ union helped develop a Candidate Physical Ability Test in 1999 that reflects not just brute strength but strictly job-related demands.

Ms. Pisanello was not disqualified. Neither did she finish soon enough – she was about four minutes over the test’s cutoff time of 10 minutes, 20 seconds.

But she came away encouraged.

Intent on building her strength and endurance through inline skating, swimming, running, and weightlifting, and improving her technique by routinely tackling hands-on drills at her volunteer fire station, she is confident she’ll be a full-time firefighter someday.

That would land her in rare company. Of the 275,000-plus career firefighters in America, only about 6,500, 2.4%, are women. That’s up from zero in 1972. Some 40,000 women serve as volunteer firefighters.

“Is it small because it’s only two percent or big because we’ve increased 50 percent” in a decade? asked Terese Floren, co-founder of Women in the Fire Service, a research group in Madison, Wis. “People have to make that call for themselves.”

The third annual training camp at the Fire Academy drew 200 women, from volunteers practicing entry-level tests to professionals getting guidance in arson detection, hazardous materials, and emergency responses to ice rescues and acts of terrorism.

The state-sponsored sessions at a converted Civil War-era college campus in the rustic Finger Lakes region broke ground in bringing together female firefighters from around the Empire State.

“There was no forum for them to ever get to know each other,” said Jackaline Ring of the state Office of Fire Prevention and Control.

Similar programs designed to bolster the female ranks have since been tried in Pennsylvania and Illinois. Fraternal groups within professional fire departments also are striving to create recruitment, training, and mentoring programs that better prepare women wanting to join up.

While some cities have broken the pattern – at least one in seven firefighters in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Madison, Wis., is female – many other major urban centers have nearly all-male forces.

Only 26 of New York City’s 11,500 firefighters are women.

The barriers begin with tradition – one of the most physically demanding jobs retains a fiercely male culture – and women trailblazers who cracked the shell a generation ago have failed to win a transformation in many places.

“It all depends on who’s running things,” said Ms. Kubarycz, 45, who in 1987 became the first female career firefighter in Rochester, N.Y. “A lot of times you try to get things going and, if you don’t have backing from the important higher-ups, it doesn’t get anywhere.”

On one side is stiff competition – “there are so many qualified men” – but perhaps harder is getting word out to women “that this is a viable option,” said Ms. Kubarycz, a bodybuilder steered into firefighting by a friend.

The test offered by the International Association of Fire Fighters, which mimics the sequential order of battling a fire, “is not only standardized but fair” in assessing physical ability, said a union official, Rich Duffy. Its use must be accompanied by recruiting and mentoring programs aimed at increasing diversity “both in gender and ethnicity,” he said.

A few dozen women lining up on the grounds of the Fire Academy roared their approval as each one progressed through the course, which begins with three minutes on a stair-climbing machine.

“Firefighting is a challenging job that not many people are willing to do,” said Ms. Pisanello, still panting after her workout. “They can’t fake it.”

If men have stronger torsos, “women may have stronger legs,” said Christa Lombardo, 29, a fire captain’s daughter who joined Buffalo’s department in 1995.

“Guys can put a lot of oomph into it. The women, it may take a little more technique,” she said.

While Ms. Lombardo “practically grew up” in a fire station, “if you don’t pull your weight, they don’t care who you are,” she said. “You have to test men and women equally. There’s differences in body types and mechanics, but the job is still the job.”

Often, her colleagues find themselves scattered in various firehouses, so the women-only weekend is a rare chance to come together.

“We hang out, we talk, we discuss,” Ms. Lombardo said. “The guys do it, we can do it.”

“I see some women who are very discouraged within their own fire department,” said the Fire Academy’s director, Richard Nagle. “They’re accepted because they have to be accepted, not because they are considered to be equal in their abilities. The men have to say, ‘Yes, there are women who can do the job and I wouldn’t mind trusting my safety to a female the same way I would to a male.'”

The union test is required across New York.

Rather than considering anyone who passes, however, some career fire departments like New York City’s draw up hiring lists weighted in favor of those who score highest on both written and physical tests.

“People should be judged on their ability to do the job and not anything else,” said Mr. Nagle, a retired FDNY lieutenant. Still, he expects “a couple of generations” will pass before there are substantial numbers of female firefighters.