Carly Fiorina

Cara Carleton "Carly" Fiorina was born on September 6, 1954 in Austin, Texas. Fiorina attended Channing School in London. She later attended five different high schools graduating from Charles E. Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina. She received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and medieval history from Stanford University in 1976. Fiorina received a Master of Business Administration in marketing from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1980. She obtained a Master of Science in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management under the Sloan Fellows program in 1989.

Starting in 1980, Fiorina rose through the ranks to become an executive at AT&T and its equipment and technology spin-off, Lucent Technologies, Inc. As chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard (HP) from 1999 to 2005, she was the first woman to lead a top 20 company as ranked by Fortune magazine. In 2002, Fiorina oversaw the biggest high-tech merger in history up to that time, with rival computer company Compaq, which made HP the world's largest personal computer manufacturer. Following HP's gain in market share as a result of the 2002 merger, Fiorina laid off 30,000 U.S. employees. On February 9, 2005, the HP board of directors forced Fiorina to resign as chief executive officer and chairman over disagreements about the company's performance, disappointing earning reports, and her resistance to transferring authority to division heads.

After leaving HP, Fiorina served on the boards of several organizations. She was an adviser to Republican John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. She won a three-person race for the Republican nomination for the US Senate in California in 2010, but lost the general election to incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer. On May 4, 2015, Fiorina announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election.