Sex, Trust, and Corporate Boards

This essay collects and interprets social science research on sex and trust and uses this work to shed new light on the emerging case for gender diversity on corporate boards. Specifically, the essay describes research findings that indicate (1) that men and women trust and are trustworthy on different bases and (2) the existence of a bias against women in corporate leadership positions. Based on this research and current legal scholarship on corporate governance, the essay asserts that gender diversity on corporate boards may be desirable but difficult to attain. The essay also calls for more targeted research on the links among sex, trusting behavior, trustworthiness, and corporate board membership

Massively Parallel Multiphase Field Simulations

The phase field method is an established technique for investigation of microstructure evolution during materials processing. Large scale three-dimensional simulations including multiple phase fields and multiple components have high requirements for memory and computational power. In this paper we present a distributed-memory parallelization of the phase field library OpenPhase. We consider load imbalances that arise during phase field calculations and propose techniques to balance the computational load efficiently among the processors. We show benchmarks using thousands of processes and use the parallelized OpenPhase for a three-dimensional simulation, that was previously only viable in two dimensions