Despite the notoriously low representation of women, parliaments in the Pacific region deserve greater scholarly attention in terms of their gender sensitivity. Yet researching Pacific parliaments is fraught with logistical, cross-cultural and political challenges: these are some of the most remote countries in the world, steeped in cultural norms that are hard to understand as an outsider. In this Introduction, I present my own motivations and limitations in researching the gender sensitivity of the Parliament of Fiji as an Australian feminist academic. I suggest there is still merit in undertaking critical research from an outsider’s perspective. I revisit four central tenets of the gender sensitive parliaments framework and its origins in the theory of feminist institutionalism. Finally, I outline the research approach taken and data collected, predominantly through interviews and content analysis of parliamentary committee reports.