The urology rotation during my third year of medical school might best be described as a boys’ club, often characterized by infighting, one-upmanship and sexual humor. It was a little off-putting to many students, but always entertaining.

So imagine my surprise when a female medical student recently told me that she loved her urology rotation, in which she found the doctors to be especially humanistic and caring. A big part of the reason, she believed, was the growing presence of women among her teachers. It turns out that the field of urology is undergoing a gender transformation.

Urologists, who are specialists in the organs that produce urine, have always cared for women. After all, as Dr. Jennifer Gruenenfelder, a urologist in Laguna Hills, Calif., reminded me in an e-mail message, “Women have kidneys and bladders and urethras and ureters, too.”

Yet even as more and more women entered medicine in the late-20th century, urology continued to overwhelmingly attract male applicants. Not until 1962 did a woman  Dr. Elisabeth Pickett  become a board-certified urologist. By the mid-1980s, the United States had only 22 female urologists.