Linda C. Babcock is the James Mellon Walton Professor of Economics at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has also served as director of the Ph.D. Program and Interim Dean at the Heinz School. She is the founder and faculty director of the Program for Research and Outreach on Gender Equity in Society (PROGRESS). In both 1991 and 2001 she received the Heinz School's award for teaching excellence

Dr. Babcock's degrees include a BA in Economics from the University of California at Irvine and an MA and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The first female member of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Behavioral Economics Roundtable, she has served on the economics review panel for the National Science Foundation and been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, the Harvard Business School, and the California Institute of Technology.

Conducted at the interface between economics and psychology, Babcock’s research focuses on negotiations and dispute resolution, and on understanding gender differences in initiating negotiations. Her research has appeared in the most prestigious economics, industrial relations, psychology, and law journals, 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. She has received numerous research grants from the National Science Foundation. 

Babcock’s 2003 book with Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide explored a newly recognized phenomenon: that women are much less likely than men to use negotiation to improve their circumstances. Women Don’t Ask looked at the causes of this reluctance on the part of women and examined the high price women pay in both lost wages and delayed career advancement. The book and Babcock’s research on women and negotiations have been discussed in hundreds of newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and abroad, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Business Week, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, and many other newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and around the world.

Babcock has also appeared on numerous television and radio stations discussing her work, including ABC’S “Good Morning, America” and “World News Now,” CBS’s “The Early Show,” NBC’s “Weekend Today Show,” CNN’s “Dollar Signs,” MSNBC, Bloomberg TV’s “Bloomberg Small Business,” NPR’s “The Motley Fool,” PRI’s “Marketplace,” CBS’s “Marketwatch Radio,” and scores of others.

In 2003, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever were invited by Representatives John Dingel and Carolyn Maloney to give a congressional briefing on the impact on the glass ceiling of the phenomenon they describe in Women Don’t Ask.

In 2005, in its 75th anniversary edition, Fortune magazine included the book in its list of “The 75 Smartest Books We Know,” a list that included The Art of War by Sun Tzu (circa 500 B.C.) The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1513), The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776,) as well as more recent titles such as The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith (1955), The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam (1972), The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker (1995), and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (2000).

Winner of an Honorable Mention in the 2003 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Women Don’t Ask has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Danish. 

Dr. Babcock lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, Mark Wessel, Dean of the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University, and their daughter. She can be contacted by email at lb2k@andrew.cmu.edu.

Sara Laschever has worked as a writer and editor for over 25 years. Her work has been published by the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, Vogue, Mademoiselle, WomensBiz, the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Review, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She has taught writing at Boston University and privately edited books published by the Harvard Business School Press, Perseus Books, Hyperion Books, and Alfred A. Knopf. She also worked for three years as a senior writer and editor at Mercer Management Consulting in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Her interest in women's life and career obstacles led her to work as a research associate and principal interviewer for Project Access, a landmark Harvard University study that explored impediments to women's careers in science—the hindrances, both internal and external, that prevent women from rising to the tops of their fields. For Project Access, Ms. Laschever interviewed over 200 scientists, both men and women, from all over the country, wrote biographical sketches of each, and summarized her findings in a lengthy document now archived at the Murray Center for Research on Women at Harvard University. Ms. Laschever's work on Project Access contributed to the publication of two seminal studies in this field, Gender Differences in Science Careers: The Project Access Study and Who Succeeds in Science? The Gender Dimension, both by G. Sonnert, assisted by G. Holton.

In 1994, Ms. Laschever co-founded the journal millennium pop, a quarterly journal (now a web-site) devoted to serious commentary about popular culture. She has appeared on the Boston area television discussion programs, "The Group," "Greater Boston," and "New England Cable NewsNight" as a cultural commentator.

Since the publication of Women Don’t Ask, Sara Laschever has been invited by organizations all over the country to speak about women and negotiation. These organizations include the Microsoft Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Procter & Gamble, the Aon Corporation, Deloitte Consulting, DuPont, the Employment Management Association, Meeting Professionals International, the Forbes Executive Women’s Forum, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Women in Communications, Inc., the U.S Environmental Protection Agency, Agnes Scott College, Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University, Columbia University, Syracuse University, University of Wisconsin Fluno School of Executive Education, Washington and Lee University, Boston College, University of Memphis, Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, Iowa State University, and many nonprofit professional associations and women’s leadership groups nationwide.