This presentation reflects on the practical and ethical challenges of researching gender inside a military institution. It draws on my experience conducting fifteen semi-structured interviews with senior and mid-level officers in the Kenya Defence Forces for a study of recruitment, training, role assignment, and deployment to United Nations peacekeeping Missions. Access was one of the main challenges. Military institutions are hierarchical, securityconscious, and cautious about outside research, especially when questions concern internal decision-making and gender inequality. I therefore avoided requests for classified or operational information and focused on officers’ general experiences, perceptions, and explanations of institutional practice. Participants were anonymized by rank and interview order, and identifying details about units and deployment locations were removed. The research also raised questions about positionality and interpretation. As a Kenyan woman interviewing mostly male military officers, I had to consider how gender, nationality, rank, and professional distance shaped what participants were willing to say. Some respondents described unequal practices as practical, protective, or necessary rather than discriminatory. This required attention not only to what officers reported, but also to how they justified decisions about competence, readiness, risk, and suitability. The presentation discusses strategies used to address social-desirability bias, confidentiality, unequal power relations, and researcher wellbeing. It argues that studying gender in closed institutions requires methodological flexibility, careful boundary-setting, and an interpretive approach that treats institutional language itself as evidence.
