The Invisible Users: Gender-Differentiated UX Failures in Municipal Digital Services and the Child-Rearing Penalty in Public Information Access

Abstract

Public digital services operate under an assumption of universal accessibility that empirical evidence rarely supports. This paper investigates a specific and underexamined dimension of public sector UX inequity: the structural disadvantage experienced by child-rearing women when navigating municipal web portals designed, implicitly, for unhurried, PC-based browsing. In a study conducted with a Japanese municipality undergoing web portal redesign, a behavioral targeting methodology was used to survey task-motivated citizens — those who had demonstrated active information-seeking behavior on the portal. The resulting dataset exposed a pronounced and statistically significant gender gap in service experience. The overall Net Promoter Score (NPS) was -52.3, but disaggregation by demographic segment revealed a critical disparity: women reported an NPS of -58.1, with women in their thirties registering -73.8 and women in their forties registering -62.3. Journey map and qualitative analysis identified the cognitive mechanism underlying this gap: female users in child-rearing years accessed the portal predominantly via smartphone, in time-constrained contexts, seeking specific procedural information. The portal's architecture — optimized for desktop browsing at an unhurried pace — imposed a disproportionate cognitive load on this segment, consistent with established Cognitive Load Theory. A subsequent redesign prioritizing smartphone-first architecture and simplified navigation hierarchies produced the strongest satisfaction improvements among precisely the groups previously most disadvantaged. This paper introduces the concept of the "child-rearing penalty" in public digital services — the measurable experiential disadvantage imposed on time-constrained caregivers by systems designed for average, unhurried users — and proposes gender-disaggregated UX analysis as a methodological prerequisite, rather than a supplementary step, in public sector human-centered design.

Keywords: Inclusive Design, Gender And UX, Cognitive Load, Municipal Digital Services, Citizen Experience, Human-centered Public Sector Design

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1008025