Diversity Backlash - a critical discussion on how resistance to inclusion impacts business competitiveness and sustainability.
Moderator: Addy Polet, Co-founder at Equinox Equality Experts
Jagoda Gregulska is the Co-founder and Chief Disruptor at Greenera, an all-female startup dedicated to cultivating climate capacities within organisations. Her work focuses on climate knowledge brokering and the design of impactful climate capacity development programmes. Jagoda brings over fifteen years of international experience in building, researching, and evaluating policies, programmes, and interventions that advance sustainability and inclusion. Before founding Greenera, she served as Deputy Director for Inclusive Green Economy, where she led initiatives at the intersection of climate action, innovation, and economic transformation.
Head of Sustainability at the DANONE group of companies in Poland (Danone, Żywiec Zdrój, Nutricia). Responsible for implementation of Danone Impact Journey Strategy
Her experience in the Gender Index and Diversity Index projects 2 decades ago laid the foundation for diversity management in Poland. She was advocating for deposit-return system for bottles and cans; she co-created Kaucja.pl.
Paulina is currently a member Supervisory Board of the Rekopol Recovery Organization, initiator and a Board Member of the Polish Plant-Based Food Association, initiator of Social Pact for Farmers. For nearly 10 years, she advised Poland’s largest companies on ESG while working at PwC and Deloitte.
Kristina Šermukšnytė-Alešiūnienė is an innovation leader dedicated to building a more sustainable and digitally empowered agrifood future. As CEO of AgriFood Lithuania and Vice President of the European Clusters Alliance, she connects policy, technology, and entrepreneurship to foster collaboration across Europe. Awarded Cluster Manager of the Year 2022 by the European Commission, Kristina actively champions women’s leadership and supports initiatives that strengthen resilience, inclusiveness, and competitiveness in the food sector.
Addy is an expert in gender mainstreaming who brings her curiosity, analytical skills, and enthusiasm to work on inclusion every day
She studied law at the honours college of Utrecht Law School before starting a career in gender- and lgbtqia+ equality, first as a legal advisor and for the past 6 years as a policy advisor, both in the field of writing the subsidy rules for gender- and lgbtqia+ equality, AI and gender, bisexual emancipation, gender and healthcare and many other fields. During this time, she was often asked to moderate panels ranging form 5 to 50 people in order to lead decision making processes, obtain valuable insights, to manage stakeholder agreement and input and discuss the international anti-rights movement and backlash.
Currently, she works for Stichting Bi+ Netherlands, the municipality of Amsterdam and (as a co-founder) Equinox Equality Experts.