How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back

Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women in 15 countries found that 36% feel more stressed than they did twelve months earlier, and 29% describe their mental health as poor. A large share of those respondents are women who run a team during the day and handle a parent's pill organizer in the evening, while keeping that second job entirely to themselves at work.

Why this figure deserves attention

Stress rising year over year is not news. The real signal lies in the source: working women across the globe, over a third of whom report that the last year was tougher than the one before it. That is not a bad week. It is a trend line, and it runs through the very years when a woman's career is at its height and her parents are at their most fragile. The two curves cross somewhere around 50, and no one drew up a calendar for that crossing. Here in Sacramento, where many senior women work in state government, health systems and the region's growing professional services firms, the crossing tends to be felt in the same offices every day.

Its origins and its blind spots

Because Deloitte's Women at Work study covers many nations, it is difficult to dismiss as a quirk of one firm's workplace. The findings rest on what respondents said about themselves, so they reflect perceived feelings rather than diagnoses. Eldercare is never singled out here as the source of the strain. Multiple pressures feed into the stress it documents, and looking after an aging relative is only one of them. Read the number as a description of the water you are swimming in, not a diagnosis of your own situation. The same research revealed that a mere 5% of women intend to remain with their current employer beyond five years. That tells you how many are quietly planning an exit instead of having a conversation.

The phone rang at 2:40 on a Tuesday afternoon, and everything shifted.

Mid-meeting, your phone shows an incoming call from your mother's care home. You step out. It is a fall, not a serious one, but someone needs to be there by five. You return to the room, wrap up the discussion, and then spend three hours reshuffling your calendar without mentioning a word to your colleagues. When a vice president slips out at four to tend to her mother, plenty of colleagues read it as her quietly pulling back, and you have seen that same judgment cling to other women like a stubborn burr.

Here is how this affects you directly.

Senior roles offer no accepted language for caregiving. Parental leave comes with forms, dates and a return plan. Caring for an elder means keeping a phone close and carrying a situation you feel unable to describe. Without a shared vocabulary, every absence gets translated into the only one on hand, which is a loss of commitment. The fix is to articulate the situation on your own terms before anyone else frames it for you.

SHORT Your next step

SHORT Ask for structure, not pity. You might put it this way: "I'm coordinating care for a parent. This is a scheduling challenge, not a question of my ability to do the job, and this is the plan I've set up. I'll be unavailable Tuesdays and Thursdays from four to six, I'll handle anything urgent by seven, and everything else stays exactly as it is." By doing this, you have described the circumstances, defined their boundaries and protected the scope of your role. The words most managers hear are "nothing else changes," and that is the part they were worried about. Next, pose a single question: "What would convince you that this arrangement is working?" That converts an unspoken concern into something measurable, and measurable goals are achievable.

How much would it take to speak that first sentence aloud, set against what your silence is already costing you?