Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Dr. Michelle Decker, founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Women's Health and Gender Equity, and Dr. Nicole Warren, a nurse and an expert on the harmful practice of female genital cutting.

They discuss the dangers of the practice, the challenge of changing longstanding cultural norms, and how they hope to prevent a procedure that affects 200 million women and girls worldwide.

Let's listen.

Michelle Decker and Nicole Warren. Thanks so much for joining me.

Great to be here.

Thank you so much for having us. It's great to be here.

I'd like to start with you, Michelle.

Today, I want to talk to you about your new center at Johns Hopkins. It's the Center for Global

Women's Health and Gender Equity. So talk to me about what it's about and how it came to be

and why it's such a need. Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

Well, I think we don't have to go far in the media

to see that we're in a really watershed moment

for global women's health and women's rights.

We see that through the sustainable development goals.

We see that through the new inaugural U.S. action plan to end

gender-based violence, the White House Gender Policy Council, and a number of other

...