Women at the Helm of Corporate Sustainability Governance: An All - Female Board Sustainability Committee in a Sarawak State-Linked Conglomerate

A substantial body of research associates women's representation on corporate boards with a stronger organisational orientation towards sustainability and corporate social responsibility, yet two limitations persist: the evidence base is overwhelmingly Western and quantitative, and it measures women's presence on boards rather than their leadership of the specific governance body responsible for sustainability.

Objectives. This paper documents and interprets a case that speaks to both gaps: a large, state-linked conglomerate in Malaysian Borneo whose board sustainability committee is chaired by, and composed entirely of, women.

Methods. The study combines the company's public corporate-governance disclosure with contextual understanding of the firm's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda from prior doctoral research, and reads the configuration through the women-on-boards-and-sustainability literature and Malaysia's corporate-governance reforms.

Results. At Cahya Mata Sarawak Berhad, the Group Sustainability Committee comprises three women directors and is chaired by a woman, distinct from the firm's other, mixed committees. The paper proposes a framework linking women's leadership of a dedicated sustainability committee to three governance mechanisms: sustained oversight attention, breadth of stakeholder orientation, and long-horizon framing.

Conclusions. The case extends the literature into an under-represented Southeast Asian, resource-dependent setting and sharpens its object from representation to leadership. It is explicitly exploratory, documenting a configuration that theory marks as consequential rather than establishing a causal effect, and sets out the confirmatory research such a case invites.

women on boards; gender diversity; corporate sustainability; corporate governance; Sarawak

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