How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back

A Deloitte survey of 7,500 women in 15 countries from 2025 found that 36% feel more stressed than they did twelve months earlier, and 29% describe their mental health as poor. That group includes many women who lead a team during the workday and manage a parent's medication schedule in the evening, and who have never mentioned that second job to anyone at work.

Why this number deserves a closer look

Rising stress is not new information. What deserves a closer look is the source: a worldwide sample of working women, over a third of whom describe the last twelve months as harder than the twelve before. That is not one rough week. It is a pattern, and it shows up in precisely the years when a woman's career is strongest and her parents are most vulnerable. Those two lines meet somewhere around age 50, and few workplaces have planned for that meeting point.

What the survey measures, and where its limits lie

Deloitte's Women at Work study is large and spans several countries, so it is difficult to write off as a single company's problem. It relies on what respondents report about themselves, which means it captures how women feel rather than offering a clinical diagnosis. Nor does the study point to eldercare as the single driver behind the strain. Pressure comes from many directions, and looking after an aging relative is just one among them. Read the number as a sense of the wider environment, not as a verdict on your own circumstances. The same survey found that just 5% of women expect to remain with their employer for more than five years, a sign of how many are quietly weighing an exit rather than starting a conversation.

The phone rang at 2:40 on a Tuesday afternoon in Columbus.

You are partway through a leadership meeting in a Columbus office when your phone lights up with your mother's care facility. You step into the hallway. The fall is minor, yet a person still needs to be with the parent in Grove City before five. You return, finish the agenda, and spend the next three hours rearranging your calendar while saying nothing to your team. A vice president who leaves at four to care for her mother risks being labeled as "stepping back," and you have seen that label attach itself to other women like a burr.

How this affects your own situation

Caregiving has almost no shared language at the senior level. A new baby brings paperwork, set dates and a plan for getting back to work. Caring for an older parent, by contrast, means a phone vibrating against your leg and a situation you feel unable to describe to anyone at work. When there is no language for something, every absence gets interpreted through the only one available, which is a loss of commitment. The better move is to put the words together yourself, before someone else puts together a harsher version for you.

What comes next

Push for workable terms instead of relying on pity. You might open with: "I'm handling care for a parent." This is a scheduling matter rather than a question of whether I can do the job, and here is my plan for it. Between four and six on Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm away from my desk, I'll deal with anything urgent by seven, and everything else stays as it is. Managers tend to respond with "everything else stays as it is," which happens to be the exact reassurance they were hoping for. Then ask one question: "What would you need to see to feel confident this is working?" That converts a vague worry into a measure, and measures can be met.

Weighed against the cost of staying quiet, what would that opening sentence really take from you?