How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back

According to Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women in 15 countries, 36% report more stress than a year ago, and 29% say their mental health is poor. Those figures reflect a large group of women who lead a team during the workday and manage a parent's medication schedule in the evening, and who have not mentioned the second job to anyone at work.

Why the figure is more striking than it first appears

A rise in stress from one year to the next is nothing unusual on its own. The detail that deserves attention is the group reporting it: working women from around the world, over a third of whom say the last twelve months were harder than the twelve before them. That is not a rough week. This is a pattern, and it lines up with the years when a woman's career is peaking while her parents are growing more fragile, a pattern that is just as visible to a leader in South Texas as anywhere else. The two lines meet somewhere around 50, and no one has drawn up a schedule for that meeting point, whether in Alamo Heights or out in Stone Oak.

What the survey covers, and where its blind spots lie

Because Deloitte's Women at Work study covers so many countries, it is difficult to dismiss as the product of one employer's culture. The findings rest on women reporting on themselves, so they reflect how people describe their feelings rather than a clinical diagnosis. The survey does not single out eldercare as the reason for the trend. The strain it captures comes from many directions, and looking after an aging relative is just one of them. Read the figure as a picture of the environment many women work in, not a diagnosis of your own situation. Deloitte also found that only 5% of women plan to stay with their employer for more than five years, which suggests how many are quietly considering an exit rather than starting a conversation.

A phone call at 2:40 on a Tuesday afternoon

Picture yourself in a leadership meeting in Universal City when your screen shows a call from your mother's care home. You step out. She has had a fall, though not a serious one, yet someone needs to be with her before five o'clock. You step back in, wrap up the discussion, and then spend the next three hours reshuffling your schedule without mentioning a word of it to your colleagues. When a vice president in Schertz or Converse slips out at four to care for her mother, she risks being tagged as "stepping back," a tag you have watched stick to other women the way a burr clings to a sweater.

Why this matters to your own working life

At the senior level, caregiving lacks a formal language. A parent taking leave is handled through paperwork, set dates and a formal plan for returning. Caring for an older relative arrives instead as a phone vibrating in your pocket and a situation you feel you cannot talk about. Without shared terms, every absence gets interpreted through the only term available, which is a loss of commitment. The better course is to supply the words yourself before someone else offers a less accurate version.

What comes after

Ask for changes to how the work is arranged, not just kind words. Try saying: "I'm managing care for a parent." This is a scheduling matter, not a matter of my ability to do the job, and this is how I'm managing it. I'll be unavailable Tuesday and Thursday from four to six, I'll cover anything urgent by seven, and nothing else changes." You have named the situation, set its limits and kept your scope intact. Most managers are really waiting to hear the words "nothing else changes," since that reassurance addresses exactly what worried them. Then pose a single question: "What would reassure you that this is working?" Doing so converts a vague concern into something measurable, and measurable goals can be achieved.

Consider what it would cost to voice that first sentence, set against what staying quiet is already taking out of you.