What Fresh Hell Is Going On With the NFL and Its Treatment of Its Cheerleaders?
It happens every few years, with the breaking of a splashy story or the filing of a lawsuit: The NFL’s estimated 150 million fans are reminded that many pro football teams treat their cheerleaders like garbage, from appalling, oppressive conditions, like regular weigh-ins, “jiggle tests,” and overbearing social media rules, to the teams raking in $13 billion hardly paying the women on the sidelines minimum wage.
The latest of these sad reminders comes courtesy of Bailey Davis, a former New Orleans Saints cheerleader who told The New York Times she was fired this past January after posting a photo of herself on her private Instagram in a lacy bodysuit. The Saints allege Davis broke the team’s social media rules, which ban cheerleaders from sharing photos of themselves “nude, seminude, or in lingerie,” according to the Times—nevermind that the Saintsations’s game-day outfits are basically bikinis themselves, or that the cheerleaders suit up in actual bikinis for the annual team calendar shoot. (Evidently, it’s only okay for cheerleaders to be scantily clad in a public forum on NFL time.) Davis has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that oversees workplace discrimination, noting that the social media policy she was fired over does not apply to the Saints’s male players.
Shocker: neither do similarly draconian rules for cheerleaders across the country. According to The Times’s analysis of multiple NFL teams’ cheerleader handbooks, including the Saints’s, “if a Saints cheerleader enters a restaurant and a player is already there, she must leave. If a cheerleader is in a restaurant and a player arrives afterward, she must leave.” The San Francisco 49ers ban cheerleaders not just from dating players but “any social interaction with or dating 49ers players, other NFL players, or 49ers employees above and beyond cordial, polite, professional interaction. This includes texting, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, et cetera.” The Saints ask that cheerleaders keep their Instagram accounts private and block any NFL player—any of the nearly 2,000 in existence—who starts following them, even if the player is using a pseudonym (which apparently many do). According to the Times, handbooks also “include personal hygiene tips, like shaving techniques and the proper use of tampons. In some cases, wearing sweatpants in public is forbidden.”
The stated intent of some of these parochial rules is to protect cheerleaders from stalkers or unwanted sexual attention from players—but teams seem to think the burden of that responsibility should fall squarely on the squads, and not be shared whatsoever with the men who might be issuing that attention. Funny how the message is always “temptresses, cover yourselves (just not in sweatpants)!” and not “men, don’t stalk and assault women.”
“The club’s intention is to completely control the behavior of the women, even when they are not actually at their workplace,” Leslie Levy, who has represented cheerleaders in lawsuits against the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, told The Times. “It’s an issue of power . . . I can’t think of another arena where employers exert this level of control, even when they are not at work.”
Further, Davis’s case is a reminder that NFL teams have a history of failing to share their vast, multi-billion dollar revenues with the female athletes who often attend every game, sell calendars in the parking lot, and are required to go to promotional events like golf outings. In 2014, the Raiderettes—the cheerleaders for the Oakland Raiders—sued the team for paying them less than minimum wage and won $1.25 million in back pay. Their victory? Minimum wage plus overtime. Cheerleading squads at the Jets, Cincinnati Bengals, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have also won pay settlements in recent years. But handbooks like that of the 49ers still note, in the benefits section, that cheerleaders will get few to none.
On top of questions about fair pay, there are teams that also place financial penalties on the little cheerleaders make. The Times cites a list of fines Raiderettes may incur: “$10 if they bring the wrong pom-poms to practice, or their boots are not polished on game day . . . If they forgot all or part of their uniform on game day, they could be docked an entire day’s pay.” To be clear: This is a team that’s part of the same larger organization that dragged its feet to punish a player who was caught on video punching his fiancée in the face.
Which is to say: None of the latest wave of revelations are a good look for the NFL and its notorious “women problem”—namely its creation of a culture where there have been multiple instances of domestic abuse and sexual harassment allegations (and where, to boot, women coaches and officials are practically nonexistent)—especially as the NFL has touted that 45 percent of its mighty fandom are women. But guess what? Those women want more than pink baby tees with your team name on it. If NFL teams really want to draw more female fans, try fair pay and fair treatment for your women employees.
