How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back
Thirty-six percent of women say their stress has climbed compared with a year ago, and 29 percent describe their own mental health as poor, according to Deloitte's 2025 survey of 7,500 women across 15 countries. Those figures reflect a large group of women who lead a team during the workday and manage a parent's medication routine in the evening, and who have never mentioned that second job to anyone at the office.
Why this figure deserves your focus
Stress climbing year after year is a pattern we have already seen repeatedly. What deserves your notice is the group reporting it: a worldwide sample of working women, more than a third of whom say the last twelve months were harder than the twelve before. That is more than a rough week. It shows up as a sustained pattern, and it lands squarely in the stretch of life when a woman is most established in her career and her aging parents are most in need of support. The two lines meet somewhere around age 50, and no one drew up a calendar for that intersection.
Where the numbers originate and the gaps they leave open
Deloitte's Women at Work survey spans many countries and is large enough that it cannot be written off as a single company's problem. Because the numbers draw on what women report about their own experience, they reflect how those women describe feeling, not a diagnosis from a clinician. The data does not isolate eldercare as the single driver behind the trend. Stress of this kind arrives from many directions, and looking after an aging family member is just one of the sources. Read the figure as a picture of the conditions surrounding you, not a verdict on your own circumstances. Deloitte also found that just 5 percent of women expect to remain with their employer for more than five years, which suggests how many are quietly weighing an exit rather than starting a conversation.
The phone ringing at 2:40 on a Tuesday afternoon in Tampa Bay.
Picture yourself mid-meeting in a Jacksonville conference room when your phone flashes with a call from your mother's care facility. You slip out of the room. A fall has occurred, not a grave one, but a family member needs to be present before five o'clock. You return, wrap up the meeting, and spend the next three hours rearranging your calendar while saying nothing to your team. When a vice president slips out at four to tend to her mother, colleagues may quickly decide she is "stepping back," a judgment you have watched stick to other women the way a burr clings to wool.
How this bears on your own working life in Jacksonville or Sarasota.
Among senior staff, people who give care at home have no common vocabulary to describe it. Parental leave comes with paperwork, set dates and a return plan. Eldercare means a phone vibrating in your pocket during Palm Beach County budget reviews and a circumstance you feel unable to put into words. Without a vocabulary, every absence gets interpreted through the only one available, which is a loss of commitment. The fix is to craft that language yourself, so it is not someone else's less favorable version that takes hold.
Action items
Request a clear plan from your manager rather than just words of comfort. Consider opening with: "I am handling care for a parent." This is a scheduling matter rather than a question of ability, and here is my plan for managing it. I am unavailable on Tuesdays and Thursdays from four to six, I will take care of anything urgent by seven, and everything else stays exactly as it is." In doing so you have described the circumstances, drawn the boundaries and kept your responsibilities whole. The phrase most managers need to hear is "nothing else changes," because that is the part they were worried about losing. After that, pose a single question: "What would reassure you that this arrangement is working?" This turns a vague unease into something measurable, and measurable goals can be achieved.
Weigh the discomfort of speaking that opening line against the price your silence is already exacting from you.