Though the Netflix series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders is filled with plenty of revelations about the organization, one of the most shocking is that despite the intense athletic demands and rigorous schedule of the elite team, many of the dancers also balance the work of being a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader with full-time jobs in order to make enough to get by. Since the series premiered, viewers have increasingly sounded off online about how low their salaries are considering the profitable organization they represent.
“The Dallas Cowboys owners justify paying their cheerleaders a paltry salary (equal to a “full-time Chick-fil-A worker”) bc it is a privilege & the women are finding their purpose, passion & sisterhood,” wrote Amy Diehl, a gender bias researcher and the author of Glass Walls on X (formerly Twitter). “The football players make tens of millions per year.”
“It’s crazy to me that people worth billions of dollars don’t value the people that keep their brand afloat by paying them a livable wage and then have crazy demands and crazy schedules that you’re paying them pennies to do,” said a TikTok user who uses the handle @dani_bananni, “because obviously, the money is there.”
In recent years, pay equity has been a prominent issue for women athletes across a range of professional sports leagues. In the NFL, the past decade has seen a growing number of cheerleaders starting to speak out, following Lacy Thibodeaux-Fields, a former Oakland Raiderette, filing the first class action lawsuit against the NFL in 2014 for wage theft and gender discrimination. By 2020, the Guardian reported that 10 of the NFL’s 26 teams had been served lawsuits for compensation, wage theft, hostile work environments, and harassment.
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