PROFILE: Leslie Rickey, Yale’s first female urology professor
With hard work, support from peers and her can-do attitude, Leslie Rickey is bringing women back into the center of urology.

Courtesy of Leslie Rickey
This September, Dr. Leslie Rickey became Yale’s first female professor in the Department of Urology.
Urology has traditionally been a male-dominated field. Women have been underrepresented in urology in both practice and research, with very few practicing female physicians compared to male physicians and research in the field largely centered on the male urinary tract.
Rickey has spent her career fighting against this underrepresentation on both fronts. She specializes in urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery, a relatively young field combining urology and gynecology to gain more comprehensive insight into the female pelvic floor as a whole.
Having been the only female faculty member in multiple urology departments, Rickey emphasized the importance of having women on staff in any workplace. Her path to professorship has been shaped by hard work, support from friends, family, colleagues and mentors and a willingness to throw herself into new things with full force.
“She was a terrific clinical urologist and a very good surgeon,” said Robert Flanigan, the chair of Rickey’s urology residency training program. “But the most remarkable thing that all of us saw about Leslie was her ability to develop tremendous relationships with her peers and patients and all the people she comes in contact with.”
Rickey did not always imagine herself going into healthcare. When receiving her undergraduate degree at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her interests in volunteer work and biology had steered her towards public health. The idea of becoming a doctor and taking responsibility for the lives of others seemed daunting and foreign.
However, when a friend asked her if she would consider it, she said she found herself thinking, “maybe I can do this.”
She went on to receive a dual masters’ and doctorate from the Tulane School of Public Health. Though she went in with the intention of studying medicine or pediatrics, she found herself drawn to procedural and surgical specialities, especially enjoying her time spent in her clinical rotation doing urology.
“My mindset is always first, I’ll try it,” Rickey said. “If I don’t like it, I can switch. If it doesn’t go well, I’ll find something else, but I think I can do this, and I’m just going to try it, I’m going to give it my best, and we’ll see how it goes. And I think that’s how I’ve approached most of these things.”
Rickey emphasized that seeing the kind and supportive people around her while training in urology was a large part of why she chose to specialize in the field. She completed her residency at Loyola University in Chicago, noting that Loyola’s track record for training women caused her to gravitate towards the program and that the experience of being surrounded by female colleagues made her residency experience a positive one.
After finishing residency, Rickey remained at Loyola for their urogynecology reconstructive surgery fellowship, which would be her first exposure to the multispecialty field of urogynecology.
“She really distinguished herself with her ability to work collaboratively with people and to deflect conflicts that can easily arise when under stress,” said Linda Brubaker, the division chair of the urogynecology fellowship training program. “She gravitates towards solutions, not towards conflicts.”
In Rickey’s view, having gynecology and urology specialists working together in the same division is essential for treating women. Many treatments for urinary issues had been developed considering only men, then applied to women without fully considering the differences in pelvic structures. The combined division allowed Rickey and her colleagues to approach women’s urinary issues with a more comprehensive perspective on women’s pelvic regions as a whole.
Upon completing her fellowship, Rickey began working in the University of Maryland’s urology department. There, she pioneered treatment for women with pelvic prolapse using robotic surgery.
“No one was doing it. I was not even doing that. So she sort of took it upon herself to go at what, at that time, was a fairly new thing,” Toby Chai, who mentored Rickey at the University of Maryland, said.
In 2013, Rickey joined Yale’s urology department. When she joined, she was again the only female faculty in the department, but in the years since has seen multiple other women join the department.
At Yale, she continues her intersectional work between urology and gynecology as the director of the Urogynecology and Pelvic Reconstructive Surgery fellowship program.
She continues to make progress in the prevention of lower urinary tract symptoms for women, an area in which there has been very little preventative research as well as very little education — resulting in many women suffering in silence. Rickey is working towards finding treatments and making the discussion of women’s urinary health more accessible and open.
“I really love every single part of what I do, so that makes it easier to put in the long days and the hard work,” Rickey said.
Urology officially became a department within the School of Medicine in 2012.
Correction, Jan. 15: An earlier version of this story misstated Dr. Rickey’s undergraduate institution.