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Last year's American Urological Association (AUA) annual meeting featured a panel discussion regarding the history, current state, and future plans for the Women in Urologic Oncology, and a few months later the its inaugural diversity and inclusion (D&I) committee.

In this video, , an associate professor of surgery/urology and director of urology residency at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, discussed the importance of organizations like the AUA finding solutions to meet diversity gaps.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

I think the AUA was to be commended for wanting to take on this whole topic and think about how they can shift and change some of their policy and procedure to modernize. And that started with the diversity inclusion task force, which has provided a number of recommendations that have really been enacted on, by the AUA, to create a standing diversity and inclusion committee that's chaired by Dr. [Larissa] Bresler. And having a new position of a chief diversity officer (CDO), I think certainly signals as an organization and a professional medical society that the AUA wants to make improvements and progress in this area.

I think it's telling that the AUA, like many other professional societies, has never had a president who's a woman. And this is for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the complicated succession system through the AUA sections.

And so, we can think of both grassroots efforts from below and leadership changes or policy and practice and norm changes from above as a bidirectional pathway towards increasing diverse representation and leadership. And I think we can reasonably say that urologic leadership is not diverse and that this isn't likely to change in passive fashion. And that change is hard but also necessary.

And so I see the potential opportunities for the D&I committee to have multiple areas of leverage and focus, be it education matters, be it coordination of D&I efforts across the sections and our subspecialty work groups, and these different focus areas as opportunities to advance that mission. I think the AUA certainly takes that very seriously, and I'm appreciative of that.

But there's also multiple other groups and individuals at local institutions and in community practice who are working on these same issues of how do we address health equity. And groups like affinity societies, like the Society of Women in Urology, or R. Frank Jones or the Hispanic Urological Society, all are working in different areas and methods to ensure that the talent that does exist within the pipeline is being advanced towards leadership opportunities.

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