How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back

Across 15 countries, Deloitte's 2025 survey of 7,500 women revealed that 36% are more stressed now than a year ago, while 29% rate their mental health as poor, a pattern women along the Wasatch Front in Utah are seeing too. Those figures take in a large share of women who lead a team during the day and manage a parent's medication schedule at night, and who have never mentioned that second job to anyone at work.

Why this figure ought to make you pause

Stress climbing year after year is hardly a novel phenomenon. The detail worth noticing is the group reporting it: working women across the globe, over a third of whom judge the past year to have been tougher than the one before it. That is not one rough week. It forms a pattern, one that peaks during the same years when a woman is most established professionally and her aging parents are most fragile. The two curves meet somewhere around 50, and no one has drawn up a calendar for that meeting point, whether you are working in downtown Salt Lake City or commuting in from Sandy or Layton.

Its origins, and what it fails to account for

Deloitte's Women at Work survey is broad and spans many countries, so it is difficult to write off as one company's poor culture. The findings rest on women's own accounts, so they reflect how people feel about their circumstances instead of a diagnosis. Nor does it point to elder care as the single source of the strain. The stress it records comes from many places, and caregiving is only one of them. Read the figure as a picture of the conditions many of us are working under, not a diagnosis of your own situation. The same research revealed that merely 5% of women intend to remain with their current employer beyond five years, a sign of how many are silently considering leaving rather than raising the issue with anyone.

A phone call came in at 2:40 that Tuesday afternoon.

Right in the middle of a leadership meeting, the phone flashed with a call from your mother's care facility. You step into the hall. She has taken a tumble, though not a dangerous one, yet someone needs to be on site by five o'clock. You return to the room, finish the agenda, and then spend the next three hours rearranging your day while telling your team nothing. Leave at four to tend to a parent and, to many colleagues, you have started to look as though you are pulling back, a judgment you have already seen cling to other women the way a burr clings to wool.

What this means for your work and your life

Senior staff have hardly any common vocabulary for caring for an aging relative. A new child brings paperwork, a timetable and a formal plan for returning to work. Looking after an elderly parent instead means a phone vibrating against your leg and an account you sense you shouldn't share. When no words exist for something, every absence gets read through the only words available, which are words about falling commitment. The way out is to supply the language yourself before someone else fills the gap.

Action items

Push for workable arrangements instead of relying on goodwill alone. You might put it this way: "I'm handling care for a parent. This is a scheduling matter rather than a question of my ability to perform, and this is my plan for it. I'll be unavailable on Tuesdays and Thursdays from four until six, I'll take care of anything urgent before seven, and everything else stays as it is." In doing so you have defined the circumstances, drawn their boundaries and kept your duties fully in place. The phrase most managers are listening for is "nothing else changes," because that is the part they were afraid of losing. Follow with a single question: "What would convince you that this arrangement is working?" Such a question converts a murky concern into something concrete, and concrete goals can actually be achieved.

Weigh what it would take to speak that first sentence against what staying quiet is already draining from you.