How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back

According to Deloitte's 2025 survey of 7,500 women spread across 15 countries, 36% report that their stress has risen over the past year, and 29% rate their mental health as poor. Those figures take in plenty of women here in the Kansas City metro 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 the office.

Why this figure deserves a closer look, especially here in Kansas City

Stress that grows year after year is a pattern that has been around for a while. The detail to focus on is the people saying it: working women from many countries, over a third of whom judge the past twelve months to have been tougher than the year before. This is clearly more than a single bad week. It is a trend, and it runs straight through the stretch when a woman's career is at its height and her parents are at their most vulnerable. The two curves cross somewhere around 50, and no one has yet built a calendar for that crossing.

What drives it, and what the figure fails to capture

Deloitte's Women at Work survey spans many countries, so it is difficult to write off as one company's bad culture. It relies on self-reporting, which means it captures how women say they feel rather than delivering a clinical finding. The survey does not point to eldercare as the single culprit. The stress it records comes from many places, and caregiving is one thread among them. Treat this statistic as a snapshot of the environment you operate in, rather than a judgment about your personal circumstances. Deloitte further reported that a mere 5% of women intend to remain with their current employer beyond five years, a sign that many are silently considering leaving rather than raising the issue with anyone.

The phone rang at 2:40 one Tuesday afternoon in Kansas City.

Mid-way through a leadership meeting, your phone flashes with a call from your mother's care home in Olathe. You step into the hall. Nothing grave has happened, just a fall, yet someone must be present by five o'clock. You slip back into the room, wrap up the discussion, and for the next three hours quietly reshuffle your schedule without mentioning a word to your team. When a vice president heads out at four to care for her mother, she runs the risk of being tagged as "stepping back," a label you have watched stick to other women the way a burr clings to wool.

What this change means for your day

Senior leaders lack a common vocabulary for caregiving. A parent's leave arrives with paperwork, set dates and a plan for returning. Caring for an aging parent, by contrast, means keeping your phone within reach and carrying a story you do not feel free to share. Without a shared language, every absence is read through the only lens available, which is a loss of commitment. The way to change that is to supply the language yourself before someone else does.

What to do next

Push for better terms, not pity. A useful line you might try is: "I'm looking after a parent right now." This is a scheduling matter, not a matter of my ability to do the job, and this is my plan." "I'll be unavailable Tuesdays and Thursdays from four to six, I'll take care of anything urgent before seven, and everything else stays as it is." In saying this, you have described the situation, drawn your boundaries and kept your responsibilities intact. The phrase most managers hear is "nothing else changes," which is exactly what they were worried about losing. Next, pose a single question: "What would reassure you that this arrangement is working?" That converts a fuzzy concern into something measurable, and something measurable can be satisfied.

Weigh what it would take for you to voice that opening line against what staying silent is already draining from you.