How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back

Deloitte's 2025 survey, which polled 7,500 women in 15 countries, found that 36% now report more stress than they did a year ago and 29% rate their mental health as poor. Those figures capture plenty of women 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 your attention in Louisville

A steady rise in stress from year to year is hardly a surprise to anyone paying attention. What should give you pause is the group reporting it: a global sample of working women, more than a third of whom say the last twelve months were harder than the twelve before. This is more than an ordinary bad week. It reflects a pattern that settles in precisely when a woman's career is peaking and her aging parents need the most support. The two curves cross somewhere around 50, and no one has drawn up a calendar for that intersection.

Its origins and the gaps it leaves behind

Deloitte's Women at Work survey is large and spans many countries, so it is difficult to write off as one company's unhealthy culture. The data come from self-reports, so they reflect how women describe their own state rather than providing a diagnosis. Nor does the survey point to elder care as the single trigger. Stress of this kind arises from many directions, with caregiving being just one among them. Read the figure as a description of the conditions many women are working under, not a diagnosis of your own circumstances. Only 5% of the women surveyed expect to stay with their employer beyond five years, a figure that hints at how many are quietly considering leaving instead of raising the issue at work.

A phone call in Louisville at 2:40 on a Tuesday

Midway through a leadership meeting, your screen flashes with a call from the care home where your mother lives. You excuse yourself and slip out. She has had a fall, and though it isn't serious, a family member needs to be on site by five. Back in the room, you wrap up the meeting and then spend three hours reshuffling your schedule, all without mentioning a word to your team. When a vice president heads out at four to check on her mother, colleagues may quickly tag her as "stepping back," a label you have watched stick to other women the way a burr clings to wool.

Why this matters for your own work

Caregiving barely has a vocabulary at the senior level. A parent's leave arrives with paperwork, set dates and a formal plan for returning to work. Eldercare comes with a phone buzzing in your pocket and a story you cannot share. Without the right language, every absence is interpreted through the only term available, which is a loss of commitment. Rather than waiting for someone less generous to label your circumstances, Louisville leaders are wise to articulate them first in their own words.

What comes after

Bargain over the framework, not over goodwill. You might open with something along these lines: "I'm handling care for a parent right now. This is a scheduling problem, not a problem with my ability to do the job, and this is how I plan to manage it. I'm unreachable Tuesday and Thursday from four to six, I'll cover anything urgent by seven, and nothing else changes." In one breath you have named the situation, set its limits and held onto your scope. The part most managers are anxious to hear is "nothing else changes," which is also the part they were most concerned about. Next, pose one simple question: "What would give you confidence that this arrangement is working?" Doing so converts a vague concern into something measurable, and measurable goals can be reached.

Set against what the silence is already costing you, what would it take for you to speak that first sentence?