Scardino, Marjorie (1947- )

US-born business executive and lawyer. Scardino was appointed president of The Economist's New York operations in 1985 (where she doubled the circulation) and rose to become chief executive of the Economist Group worldwide from 1993. In 1997 she was appointed CEO of Pearson, the group that owns the Financial Times and the Penguin publishing group. She became the first woman to head a FTSE-100 company, and since taking over has built up Pearson's education content into a world leader.

During her tenure, Scardino has sold more than £2 billion of non-core assets, including the wax museum group Tussauds (for $563 million), and a 13.2% stake in the Lazard group of investment banks (for $650 million). She expanded the Financial Times's US circulation figures and put in new management, including the former head of McGraw-Hill's education business, US executive Peter Jovanovich. She acquired Simon & Schuster's education assets for $4.6 billion in 1998, making Pearson a leading educational textbook publisher, and Dorling Kindersley (a children's and illustrated book publisher) for $466 million two years later. After securing an interest in Family Education Network (a supplier of education on the Internet and the centrepiece of Pearson's Learning Network portal), Scardino penetrated the online school market further by buying the little-known US National Computer Systems (NCS), which provides online testing and assessment, for $2.5 billion. Scardino merged Pearson's television interests with CLT-Ufa (part of German executive Thomas Middelhoff's Bertelsmann group), creating a group worth over £19 billion, and also bought All American Communications, the producer of the popular TV series Baywatch.

Scardino was born in Flagstaff, Arizona. She graduated from Baylor University with a BA in French and psychology in 1969, and from the University of San Francisco in law in 1975. She met her husband, US journalist Albert Scardino, during her first job at Associated Press. Scardino was a managing partner in law firm Brannen, Wessels & Searcy from 1976 to 1985, while managing a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in Georgia. The Georgia Gazette, a progressive and acclaimed weekly newspaper founded by Scardino and her husband, closed in 1985 through loss of advertising revenue.

Scardino is a director of ConAgra Inc. and a number of charitable and advisory boards, and was named Veuve Cliquot Business Woman of The Year in 1998.