How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back
Thirty-six percent of women say their stress has grown compared with a year ago, and 29% describe their own mental health as poor, according to Deloitte's 2025 survey of 7,500 women across 15 countries. Those figures take in 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 said nothing about that second job to anyone at work.
Why the number should get your attention
Stress that climbs year after year is hardly a surprise to anyone in Indianapolis or beyond. The part worth noticing is the source: a worldwide survey of employed women, over a third of whom report that the past twelve months were more difficult than the twelve before them. That is not a rough week. It forms a pattern, one that lands precisely when a woman is most active in her career and her aging parents need her most. The two lines meet somewhere around age 50, and few people, in Indianapolis or anywhere else, planned for that intersection.
Where it comes from and what it leaves out
Deloitte's Women at Work survey is large and spans many countries, which makes it hard to write off as one company's poor culture. Because the findings come from women describing their own experience, they reflect how those women feel instead of offering a medical diagnosis. Nor does the study point to elder care as the sole culprit behind the strain. Several forces feed into the stress it captures, and looking after an aging relative is only one of them. Read the figure as a picture of the conditions many women work under, not a verdict on your own circumstances. The survey also found that just 5% of women plan to stay with their employer for more than five years, which shows how many are quietly weighing an exit rather than starting a conversation.
At 2:40 on a Tuesday afternoon, the phone rang with news that changed everything
Mid-meeting in a Carmel or Fishers boardroom, your phone flashes with a message from your mother's care home. You step into the hallway. Her fall is minor, but somebody needs to be on site before five o'clock. You return, finish the meeting, and spend the next three hours rearranging everything while telling your team nothing. A vice president who leaves at four to look after her mother risks being seen as "stepping back," and you have watched that label attach itself to other women like a burr.
What it means for you
At the senior level, there is no established way to talk about caring for family. A new baby brings paperwork, set dates and a planned return to work. Caring for an aging parent, by contrast, arrives as a buzzing phone and a situation you feel unable to describe out loud. Without shared language, every absence gets read through the only frame available, which is a loss of commitment. The fix is to create that vocabulary yourself, before someone else defines it for you.
Action steps to take now
Negotiate structure, not sympathy. Try saying: "I'm managing care for a parent. This is a question of scheduling, not of my ability to do the job, and this is my plan." "I'm out of reach on Tuesdays and Thursdays between four and six, I'll take care of anything pressing by seven, and everything else stays as it is." In those few sentences you have described the situation, drawn its boundaries and preserved your responsibilities. The line most managers are waiting to hear is "everything else stays as it is," since that addresses their real concern. Next, pose a single question: "What would convince you this arrangement is working?" Doing so converts a fuzzy anxiety into something measurable, and something measurable can be satisfied.
Think about what it would take to speak that first line, weighed against what staying quiet is already draining from you.