Leadership Quote by Andrea Jung

“Unique” is doing a lot of PR heavy lifting here. Andrea Jung’s line isn’t just a brag about Avon’s workplace culture; it’s a carefully calibrated defense of a brand and a business model that have long depended on women’s labor while being vulnerable to accusations of exploiting it. By pairing “family-friendly policies” with a hard statistic about leadership, she stitches together two ideas that often get pitted against each other: caregiving and power. The message to recruits and consumers is bluntly aspirational: you don’t have to choose.

The subtext is more strategic. Avon sells empowerment as much as it sells lipstick, and Jung is speaking in the language of corporate feminism that rose with her era: measurable representation, pipeline narratives, glass-ceiling talk. “46 percent of our officers are women” lands as proof, not poetry. It’s meant to preempt skepticism by putting a number where a slogan might be.

Context matters: Jung became CEO in 1999, when “having it all” rhetoric was colliding with the reality of stalled advancement for women in corporate America. Avon, with its massive female sales force and global footprint, needed legitimacy as a modern employer, not a relic of door-to-door capitalism. The quote also reads as a quiet recruiting pitch to ambitious women and a reputational shield to investors: our culture isn’t a perk, it’s a competitive advantage.

Still, the phrasing hints at what it can’t fully say. Family-friendly policies are often framed as benevolence, not as infrastructure that makes work possible. “Unique” implies scarcity: in a fairer labor market, this wouldn’t be remarkable at all.