Documentary Turns a ‘Feminist Gaze’ on NFL Cheerleaders’ Fight for Pay Equity

Maria Pinzone wanted to be a cheerleader ever since she was a little girl, when she first met members of the Buffalo Jills, the since-disbanded cheerleading squad for the Buffalo Bills National Football League team. She dreamed of the sparkly costumes, the adrenaline that accompanied game days, and a platform that would allow her to contribute to her close-knit community in upstate New York.

But when she finally made the team in 2012, when she was in her mid-20s, she got more (or perhaps, less) than she bargained for. She was paid only for local appearances in the community, rather than for cheering itself. And the women sometimes endured a punishing work environment, in which Pinzone said they were forced to do jumping jacks so coaches could critique their physiques, adding that she and others were also benched when their bodies weren’t in top shape for game days.

For the year during which she worked for the Jills, for about 20 hours a week, Pinzone got paid a paltry $105 total, she said. (She, like many of the other cheerleaders, also worked another full-time job — at an accounting firm, in her case — to support herself while cheering.)

“People don’t see what goes on behind the scenes,” Pinzone told me. “It’s hours and hours of work and practice.”

Her desire to bring the facts to light is part of what motivated Pinzone and four other former Jills cheerleaders to file an April 2014 class action lawsuit against the Bills, on the basis of wage theft and unsafe working conditions. Also added as co-defendants were two companies that managed the Jills — and, later, the NFL.

Truth-telling, Pinzone said, was also what motivated her to allow director Yu Gu to follow her for five years, to film A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem, a documentary that premiered on streaming platforms Jan. 26 and takes viewers behind the scenes of Pinzone’s and other cheerleaders’ fights for fair pay from the NFL, which generated $477 million in revenue during the 2019 season, according to Forbes. As of September, 10 out of the 26 NFL teams with cheerleaders have been sued for wage theft, unsafe working conditions, sexual harassment, and discrimination, the film notes. It also features an interview with Bailey Davis, a former cheerleader for the New Orleans Saints, who filed a gender discrimination complaint against the team with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when she was fired after posting a picture of herself on Instagram in lingerie.

For Gu, who made the documentary with a team of three other Asian women, the film offers a way to resist stereotypical images of American cheerleaders as hyperfeminized figures who exist only to entertain a majority male audience. Instead, she spotlights the women’s lives after they leave their squads, and as they fight what the director characterizes as a feminist struggle.

“It was basically a way to subvert that previously homogenous male gaze that was used to create images of these women,” Gu said of making the film. “For me, it was about using my camera — using a feminist gaze — to look at their world and their experiences.”

The documentary — which has qualified as an Oscar contender, and is available on iTunes/Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Xbox/Microsoft Video, FandangoNow, Vudu, and Vimeo — follows Pinzone and Lacy Thibodeaux Fields, who cheered for the Oakland Raiderettes and became the first NFL cheerleader to sue her team for wage theft and breaking state and federal employment laws. (The Oakland Raiders moved to Nevada last year, and were renamed the Las Vegas Raiders.)

Gu became fascinated with football while she was studying at the University of Southern California, as a graduate student in film in the late 2000s. She described her experience there as being in a bubble: a Chinese immigrant who moved to California from Canada, she was surrounded by mostly white students at the private university, she said, and unsettled by the fact that the wealthy school sat in the midst of poverty characterizing the nearby communities, made up of majority people of color. The weekly football games seemed to be the only place where the bubble burst.

“When I saw the USC Trojans games every weekend, people from all walks of life would be going to watch, and tailgating, and celebrating the team, the wins,” Gu said. “It literally brought together whole swaths of economic classes, races, and different genders. You can visibly see the power of this game.”

But the traditional physical, social, and emotional expectations for football players and cheerleaders struck her as serving only to reinforce traditional gender roles, she said. And when Gu learned about Thibodeaux Fields’ lawsuit, she saw more clearly how her fight — and others’ — could serve as a lens through which to tell a broader story, about the inequities historically linked to women’s labor, she added.

“[The gender binary is] a construct that really hurts both men and women, but in this case it disproportionately affects women, because of wage theft,” she said. “They’re not getting paid for the amount of work they’re doing, and they’re not valued fairly, and you see the effects of that throughout their life … it’s cumulative.”

Pinzone’s and Thibodeaux Fields’ lives are, indeed, on full view in the film — including their marriages, Thibodeaux Fields’ experiences of pregnancy and motherhood, and Pinzone’s loss of her mother. Thibodeaux Fields’ scenes in particular — in which she does household chores, takes care of her kids, and asks her husband for help — are part of Gu’s efforts to contextualize cheerleading as one of the many forms of “women’s work” that are devalued in American society.

In one scene, while she folds her laundry in the London house to which she and her family temporarily moved for her husband’s job, Thibodeaux Fields echoes a perennial — and distinctly gendered — problem: “All I do all day is take care of people, in the same monotonous housework. I don’t ever sit and think about myself, or do anything for myself,” she says. “I mean, I think every stay-at-home mom would probably tell you the same thing.”

For Gu, filming the women’s private lives — the ups and the downs — offered a way to portray fuller depictions of the former cheerleaders than the classic images of them, by portraying their real-world struggles alongside moments of joy.

“My goal was to neither put them on a pedestal nor show them as complete victims — I wanted to show all the different dimensions [of their lives],” she said.

Victories did come over the course of filming: Thibodeaux Fields’ case wound up being the first in which NFL cheerleaders were awarded damages for their lost wages — $1.25 million total — in a September 2014 settlement with the Raiders, which also tripled current cheerleaders’ wages by paying them $9 per hour they work, as opposed to $125 per game. Thibodeaux Fields finally received her settlement funds — about $12,000 — two and a half years later, in May 2017. The Raiders did not admit any wrongdoing by settling, A Woman’s Work notes.

For Pinzone, victory took longer to arrive — and is still incomplete. In 2017, the New York Supreme Court ruled that the Jills were, indeed, employees who had been misclassified as independent contractors — a ruling that changed the terms of the conversation, so that it was no longer a matter of if they would be paid, but when.

“That was huge,” Pinzone said. “That, right there, we won.”

But by that point, the Jills were no more: The team was disbanded following the initial April 2014 filing of Pinzone’s lawsuit, and the squad hasn’t returned to the field since. The dissolution led many Jills to feel torn about supporting the lawsuit, and others blamed it outright for bringing the team to an early end.

Cheerleading, and the NFL organization more broadly, are often discussed in terms of “family” throughout the film, in ways that both reveal the primacy of patriarchal ideals and recall the pervasive degradation of women within families — even as they work to help uphold them.

Demaurice Smiths, the executive director of the NFL Players Association — a labor union that represents the players — dispels the myth of the “football-as-family” metaphor while offering support for the cheerleaders’ cause: “When you get to the team, don’t believe for a minute that you’re part of a family,” he tells the women. “You’re not in the will.”

Gu was drawn to exploring the ways in which the women were locked out of these tight-knit communities — both while they were ostensibly a part of them, and once they had formally left — given her own life experiences as an immigrant shifting between cultures and communities. She was born in Chongqing, a city in southwestern China, and grew up in Vancouver, Canada, before moving to the U.S. to study.

“For me, because I’ve been an outsider for my entire life, that’s something that I’m very familiar with,” she said. “I was very curious about how that really affects someone mentally, emotionally, as they struggle with also having a family and raising kids and dealing with caregiving while facing this kind of ostracization.”

Pinzone sees the blackballing by some former Jills as the price she and her co-plaintiffs have to pay to help make wider change for women — in the NFL and beyond.

“I just think we started a platform for women to stand up for their value and their work,” she said. “I know it’s having an impact.”

Her lawsuit remains ongoing, nearly seven years after it was first filed. In the meantime, when people watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, she hopes they remember the humanity of the women on the sidelines.

“I hope that viewers will remember how hard an NFL cheerleader works, on and off the field.”