Indeed, it’s the flamenco dancer I find I send most often when a friend has achieved greatness. Her one arm in the air, she suggests an attitude of self-assurance, of cool-minded confidence.

Flamenco! I sent recently when a friend sold her book for $50,000.

Flamenco! I sent when another secured a grant to conduct research in Ireland.

Flamenco! I sent when another broke up with her boyfriend who had, for months, been eating all her food.

Flamenco! Flamenco! Flamenco! You are impressive and you are kicking butt!

But now my friend had tenure, and the flamenco was not enough. My friend had not danced her way to the provost’s office, had not shimmied her tweed-blazered body into scholarly stardom. Nothing about her achievement was choreographed; nor was she concerned about her hair, her nails, her smile. At times, in fact, I trust she was frowning. She had put in long hours and designed new courses and sat through so many meetings. She had spent every one of the past 10 summers in libraries and had graded several thousand papers, writing — more times than I care to imagine — Proofread! and Word choice!

And she had done this knowing the odds were against her. In most professions, women make less than men, but in academia this pay gap is compounded by the fact that women tend to spend more uncompensated time advising students while also being subjected to student evaluations that studies show are consistently biased against them. Female academics are promoted at much slower rates, and fewer still choose to stay in the field as a result, and even fewer, then, are even present when the time for tenure comes. Perhaps it’s no surprise that men hold three-quarters of full professorships within the United States.

When my friend and I met up for drinks, we talked about this disparity, and the smaller one on our screens. Scrolling through the options, we rejected the dancer and the unicorn and, in lieu of anything else, settled on a penguin. My friend was, we agreed, a penguin. Not a creature of mythical imagination, but something real. I’d read, I told her, a recent report about several hundred thousand penguins trapped by a collapsed glacier in Antarctica. Thousands had died, but the ones that survived did so only through perseverance — regularly traveling some 40 miles across barren nothingness to reach the ocean.