Assessing Gender Equality in Community Leadership and Governance Roles in Malaysia

Women holding positions in corporate governance has become a strategic and moral issue in fostering firm performance, building stakeholder confidence, sustainable governance, and fostering governance circles globally. In Malaysia, changes in regulation, self-imposed governance codes, and pressure from investors to promote gender diversity in the boards of public listed companies (PLCs) have yielded little, and women remain grossly underrepresented in board and senior management positions. This paper presents the Malaysian Corporate Gender Governance Model (MCGGM), which seeks to combine three dimensions of the female corporate governance pipeline: institutional pressures, organisational practices, and self-leadership. The author draws from institutional theory, gender role congruity theory, and stakeholder theory, to describe the model which captures the effects of the combined presence of board-level coercive and normative institutional frameworks, organisational inclusive frameworks, and individual empowerment frameworks, and how these frameworks interact to determine individual placement on the governance continuum. The paper provides hypotheses to be empirically tested in the future and offers pragmatic, policy, and social proposals to increase women’s presence on boards. By integrating broad determinants and focusing on differences between the absence of meaningful compliance and the presence of substantive compliance, this study makes a contribution to the corporate governance field and sets the stage for future empirical studies in Malaysia and other similar developing economies.