Carly Fiorina

She married Todd Bartlem, a classmate at Stanford, in June 1977. The couple divorced in 1984.

She married AT&T executive Frank Fiorina in 1985. Frank had two daughters from a previous marriage but the couple did not have any children of their own. Her husband has always been supportive of Carly’s high-profile career.

Carly Fiorina was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009. She underwent surgery, radiation and chemotherapy and was ultimately given an excellent prognosis for a full recovery.

She was born as Cara Carleton Sneed on September 6, 1954, in Austin, Texas, U.S. to Joseph Tyree Sneed III and Madelon Montross. Her father was a judge and law professor while her mother was an artist. She has two siblings.

The family moved frequently due to her father’s job and she received her schooling from many different schools, finally graduating from Charles E. Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina.

She studied philosophy and medieval history at Stanford University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1976.

She aspired to become a lawyer like her father and enrolled at the UCLA School of Law. However, she soon realized that law was not her calling and dropped out after just one semester.

She worked at different jobs before deciding to further her education. She went on to earn a Master of Business Administration in marketing from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1980.

Carly Fiorina joined AT&T as a management trainee in 1980. She joined the Network Systems division due to her interest in the emerging field of network communications. The field was primarily a male-dominated one, but the feisty young woman soon carved out a niche for herself in the company.

Over the next decade she steadily rose through the ranks in AT&T and was named the division’s first female officer. She eventually became the head of North American sales.

During the mid-1990s AT&T decided to spin off its Western Electric and Bell Labs divisions into a new company called Lucent. Fiorina was selected to lead the efforts and she played a key role in planning and implementing the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 1996 which became one of the most successful IPOs in U.S. history.

In late 1996, she was appointed president of Lucent's consumer products business and in 1997, she was appointed chair of Lucent's consumer communications joint venture with Philips, namely, Philips Consumer Communications.

By the late 1990s she had become one of the most prominent business executives in America and was aggressively courted by several top companies. She joined Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) in July 1999 as the CEO, succeeding Lewis Platt, and becoming the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company.

Carly Fiorina’s biggest achievement as a business executive is the role she played in the 2002 merger of HP with Compaq, a leading competitor in the industry. The merger created the world's largest personal computer manufacturer by units shipped. The merger however did not prove to be much successful and she was soon forced to resign from HP.