Linda Babcock is the James M. Walton professor of economics and is the former acting dean at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. She is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Behavioral Economics Roundtable and has served on the economics review panel for the National Science Foundation. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, the Harvard Business School and the California Institute of Technology. She co-wrote Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the gender divide (2003), which was named by Fortune Magazine as one of the 75 smartest business books of all time and earned an honorable mention for the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Babcock a winner of the biannual Jeffrey Z. Rubin Theory-to-Practice Award by the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). She had previously won the Best Paper Award from the International Association for Conflict Management.

Her research occurs where economics and psychology meet, and her focus is negotiations and dispute resolution. Her research has appeared in journals across disciplines, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations and the Journal of Legal Studies. Her recent work focuses on gender differences in initiating negotiations and reactions to women when they negotiate. She has received numerous research grants from the National Science Foundation.

Babcock twice received the Heinz School's award for teaching excellence. She founded the Program for Research and Outreach on Gender Equity in Society (PROGRESS) and is its faculty director. PROGRESS develops tools to teach women and girls how to harness the power of negotiation. A partnership with the Girl Scouts Trillium Council and offers a Girl Scout skills badge for negotiation called “Win-Win: How to Get What You Want.” Babcock is also the faculty director for the Carnegie Mellon Leadership and Negotiation Academy for Women.