Marjorie Morris Scardino, DBE, FRSA (born 25 January 1947) is an American-born British business executive. She is the former CEO of Pearson PLC. Scardino became a trustee of Oxfam during her tenure at Pearson. She has been criticized by Private Eye magazine because, while Oxfam campaigns against corporate tax avoidance as part of the IF Coalition, Pearson was "a prolific tax haven user...routing hundreds of millions of pounds through an elaborate series of Luxembourg companies (and a Luxembourg branch of a UK company) to avoid tax". She became the first female Chief Executive of a FTSE 100 company when she was appointed CEO of Pearson in 1997. She is also a non-executive director of Nokia and former CEO of the Economist Group. During her time at Pearson, Pearson's profits tripled, to a record £942m. In December 2013, she joined the board of Twitter as its first female director, after a controversy involving a lack of diversity on the Twitter board.
