How senior women negotiate flexibility without stepping back

Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women across 15 nations found that 36% feel more stressed than they did twelve months earlier, and 29% describe their mental health as poor. Those figures capture a great many women who lead a team by day and manage a parent's medication schedule by night, and who have never mentioned that second job to anyone at work.

The reason this number should make you stop and look twice

A year-over-year climb in stress is hardly a headline anymore. The detail that deserves your focus is the source: working women worldwide, over a third of whom report that the past year has been tougher than the one before it. What you are going through reaches well past one difficult week. It is a sustained pattern, concentrated in the years when a woman's career peaks and her aging parents need the most support. Around age 50, those two trajectories converge, and nobody has built a schedule to accommodate that overlap. Here in Richmond, where many senior women are juggling roles at firms along the downtown corridor or at the health systems in Henrico, the pattern is just as familiar.

Where the figures come from, and which people in Central Virginia they leave out

Because Deloitte's Women at Work study covers numerous countries and draws on a large sample, it cannot be dismissed as the quirk of a single employer's culture. Its findings come from respondents describing their own experiences, so they reflect perceived feelings instead of diagnosed conditions. The study does not single out eldercare as the driver of this strain. Stress of this kind arises from many directions, with caregiving representing just one. Read the number as a description of the conditions you are working within, not a diagnosis of your own situation. The same research revealed that a mere 5% of women intend to remain at their current employer beyond five years. That tells you how many are quietly weighing an exit instead of having a conversation.

A 2:40 phone call on a Tuesday afternoon

Mid-meeting, your screen shows a call from your mother's care facility. You step out. Nothing catastrophic has happened, just a fall, but someone must be on site before five o'clock. You go back in, wrap up the agenda, and then spend the next three hours reshuffling your calendar without mentioning a word to your colleagues. When a vice president heads out at four to check on her mother, many observers read it as her "pulling back," and you have seen that tag cling to other women the way a burr clings to wool.

How this touches your daily life in RVA

Senior roles offer no established language for caregiving. A new parent receives paperwork, a leave window and a return-to-work plan. A person caring for an aging parent gets a ringing phone and a private situation they sense they should keep quiet about. Without a shared vocabulary, every absence gets translated into the one available, which is a loss of commitment. The fix is to create that language yourself, before someone else leaves the gap for others to interpret.

Actions to follow

Seek adjustable arrangements from your employer rather than only kind words. Consider phrasing it like this: "I'm handling care for a parent in Ashland." It's a scheduling problem, not a problem with my ability to lead, and this is my plan for it. I won't be available Tuesdays and Thursdays from four to six, I'll take care of anything urgent by seven, and everything else stays the same." In those few sentences you have named the circumstance, defined its boundaries and kept your responsibilities intact. The line most managers are really waiting to hear is "everything else stays the same," since that addresses the loss they fear most. Finish by asking, "What would convince you this arrangement is working?" Doing so converts a fuzzy concern into something measurable, and measurable goals can be achieved.

Weigh what it would cost you to speak that first sentence against what your silence is already draining from you.