This study intends to investigate the impact of bank audit committees' composite and bank risk-taking behavior in Malaysia from 2010 to 2019. The audit committee is accountable for assuring the accuracy of financial reporting disclosure, interacting with internal and external audit functions to strengthen the controls' function. The Islamic bank in Malaysia are required to adhere the Shariah compliance framework in their operational activities under the IFSA 2013. Following this, the Bank Negara of Malaysia (BNM) introduced new policy documents on corporate and Shariah governance in 2016 and 2019 respectively to further promote prudent risk management practices among Islamic banks in the nation. Audit committees play a crucial role in monitoring the risk-taking operations of banks to meet regulatory and relevant stakeholders' compliance requirements. Existing literature acknowledges the role of audit committees' effectiveness and corporate profitability performance relationship in non-banking sectors. This paper attempts to conduct an empirical study using the static panel data regression technique to examine the relationship between bank risk-taking and audit committees by comparing the composite changes over time to determine the effectiveness.

Female directorships become significant contributors to corporate decision-making by targeting 30% of women on the board requirement under the Malaysian Code of Corporate Governance 2017 (MCCG 2017). Gender diversity in board composite attracts attention in corporate governance studies, while vast literature documented that female director have more substantial positive implications on firm performance. In nature, females behave risk-aversion psychologically and are relatively more conservative than men while making decisions. Hence, board gender diversity and firm risk-taking behavior are gaining much interest in academic and industry players to the extent of sustainable socioeconomic development. However, there is still not much investigation conducted on the role of female directors in Islamic banks with the stereotype of woman's lack of opportunities to compete with men in a top high-ranking position, particularly in the Islamic banking environment. This study proposed a conceptual framework to examine the composite of female directors in Islamic banks in Malaysia, with the new targeting proportion of women directorship under MCCG 2017, and the relationship of bank risk-taking behavior. Moreover, this paper also makes an attempt to propose other bank governance and bank-specific characteristics as control variables for analyzing the association between female director and bank risk-taking behavior.

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