The Cost of the Dream: What Cheerleaders Reveal About the Value of Women’s Work.

The American dream. Three simple words that ignite so much hope and wonder. It’s the pursuit of happiness, the ambition for more, the work ethic, all wrapped in star-spangled banners and perfectly aligned teeth. It’s hard to resist.
Media representation is key to how we understand the world around us. And few things capture and represent the dazzling spectacle of the American dream quite like Netflix’s America’s Sweethearts: The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. From first auditions to flawless performances, the show follows some of America’s top dancers in their pursuit of becoming Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

A polished assemblage of idealised hyper-femininity and curated aesthetics, camaraderie dressed in white-hot pants and sequinned jackets—these women serve the Dallas Cowboys NFL team and fans. They bring energy and enthusiasm to the Holy Grail of American football and, with their hard work and positive mindset, are the quintessential all American girl. Throw me some fake tan and a hot dog, and I’m in.

Season one was a hit: a high-gloss portrait of hyper-feminine, mostly white beauty, softened by an undercurrent of religion. Ideologically, their sexuality was offset by hard work and the virtue of church. Hot, gracious, and wholesome to a T, they became overnight celebrities thanks to social media.

Season two picks up the same polished rhythm—hard-working, can-do girls juggling multiple jobs, looking immaculate, navigating relationships, all while expressing deep gratitude for the opportunity to represent the Cowboys franchise. But this time, Netflix ditches the religious narrative. Instead, it leans into a slightly more intersectional lens, representing race, ability, and background more widely, and spotlighting the extra labour these women take on to sustain the dream.

Because behind the shimmer lies something more sobering. These women, at the centre of one of the most lucrative sporting franchises in the world, work up to 40-hour weeks. Consistent late nights and weekend appearances are part of the job, yet they receive low compensation for their time.

And then, in episode six, comes this line:

“That’s where the dog beds came in. We had no time, so we curled up on the dog beds in the changing room, got four hours’ sleep, and started right back at it.”

That line tore me out of my haze. The fantasy of the American dream burned away, exposed by the harsh reality of their lived experience.

So what is the reality of a DCC dream? Working roughly 30 to 40 hours a week, often with late nights and weekend commitments, many NFL cheerleaders historically earned as little as $150 USD ($228 AUD) per game — totalling roughly $22,500 USD ($34,200 AUD) per season. More prominent cheerleaders at elite franchises like the Cowboys were said to earn up to $500 USD ($760 AUD) per match, though even that figure placed them below mascots and team assistants in the league’s hierarchy. When compared to the median NFL player salary of $860,000 USD, it feels not just disproportionate, but a reflection of how their labour is systemically undervalued and their role diminished.

Despite the high-gloss production, the show doesn’t entirely gloss over just how undervalued these women are. Behind the pageantry we see a system that trades on their silence, resilience, and ever-smiling “thank-you-for-the-opportunity” politeness. Alarmingly, it seems, smiling submission isn’t just admirable, but expected.

These women must remain resilient to their situation at all costs. And that resilience protects the system far more than it protects the women inside it. Angela McRobbie, a leading theorist on gender and media, argues that respectability today hinges on women's productivity. A career becomes a marker of identity, regardless of background or circumstance. And as the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders show us, even low-paid, precarious work is framed as respectable. One coach even encouragingly says:
“That’s what makes you so special—doing all the jobs you do and this.”

As if being properly compensated by the DCC franchise would somehow cheapen their worth.

This is McRobbie’s resilience at work: systemic hardship repackaged as personal growth, and gruelling hard work mistaken for gratitude. Structural inequality is obscured by a narrative that rewards silent perseverance. Their strength lies not in protest, but in their capacity to absorb hardship. “I can get through this” replaces critique and resentment.

And for not challenging the system, these women are celebrated for surviving it. Beautifully.

The show peels back the gloss, revealing the exhaustion, the silence, and the endless effort poured into a dream that always asks for more. The extensive training hours of cheerleading, the careers, the extra jobs, the education, the need to become influencers just to make ends meet. The late nights. The boyfriends, husbands, and families who hold them together. An almost inverted gender narrative, where women perform and provide, while their partners wait on the sidelines, offering dinner and emotional support.

And then there’s the absolute horror of it: women sleeping in dog beds during camp because there quite literally wasn’t time to go home and rest. “I tell the rookies we should be grateful for this opportunity. It doesn’t come round often,” one cheerleader states, without irony.

Call me cynical, but I don’t think Netflix includes this moment because it has the cheerleaders’ best interests at heart. It’s there because leaving it out would be culturally tone-deaf, without acknowledgement it would be bad for the Netflix brand. In that sense, Netflix is one step ahead of the DCC franchise. This is where we start to see the dial shift—representation becoming tied not just to the women’s resilience and low or unpaid labour, but to her economic value.

The DCC may cling to a 1960s version of femininity; the uniforms, the hair, the rules, all preserving a vision of women frozen in time. But the cheerleaders’ lived reality couldn’t be further from that fantasy. These are women navigating precarious economies while performing physical labour at elite levels. Behind the scenes, they’ve been pushing back. No longer silent, the past few years have seen them engage lawyers, seeking fair pay and recognition within the organisation.

Tracking the undercurrent of pay negotiations, several veterans quietly lead the way, with the option for others to follow. It’s framed as emotionally draining, with the subtle suggestion that speaking up could jeopardise their place on the team. There’s a fear, the risk of being seen as ungrateful.

A significant 400% increase in compensation is revealed in the final moments of the series. The raise follows years of advocacy and legal action, including a 2018 lawsuit and a 2019 settlement. The DCC increased cheerleader pay from $75 to $500 per week for training camp, and from $200 to $400 per game. This change came only after years of underpayment, mounting pressure, and public scrutiny, and arguably, at significant personal cost to the few cheerleaders spearheading the change.

It’s a huge moment for the individuals within the team, and a complex, hard-won wider shift in how women’s labour is represented and valued inside brands, businesses and the media. Contextually, it sits inside a system where work like theirs, which is in care of others (the players, team and fans), has long been expected, yet rarely rewarded. ​​

Studies consistently show that women perform the majority of unpaid domestic and care work, globally and locally. According to the OECD, women spend between two to ten times more time than men on unpaid tasks like childcare, housework, and elder care. In Australia, women dedicate over 64% of their weekly working hours to unpaid care, compared to just 36% for men. And in the U.S., women spend 37% more time on such work than their male counterparts.
This low or unpaid labour is the invisible frame that holds entire systems together. An undercurrent that's running through the day-to-day experience of women, both inside and outside the home. Cheerleaders, rallying in support of NFL players, couldn’t be a more literal signifier and representation of labour that holds cultural capital yet carries disproportionately low monetary value. It’s expected, not rewarded, aka, lucky enough to be part of the show.

The Dallas Cowboys: America’s sweethearts shows us that in the media the American Dream may have shifted, and this has a cultural ripple on the Western World. Yes, it’s still about hard work and dedication, all wrapped in the hope that anything is possible. But when it comes to women, resilience and gratitude are no longer enough. The symbolic capital of femininity doesn’t pay the bills, and increasingly, women are saying so.

What this show quietly exposes, and what many institutions still fail to grasp, is that economic value is becoming part of what defines a woman’s worth. The gap between how women are represented and how they actually live is becoming harder to ignore.

Women now influence up to 85% of household purchasing decisions. In 2023, the number of female millionaires in Australia grew at a rate of 5.7%, nearly double that of male millionaires. Single women are increasingly entering the property market, with recent data showing they are purchasing homes at rates approaching those of single men. Globally, 80% of Forbes' 100 Most Powerful Women are over the age of 50. In Australia, women are poised to inherit $3.2 trillion over the next decade, marking the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in the nation's history.

The rules of what makes a woman “respectable” are constantly being negotiated, and the representations in this show bring that into focus. No longer rooted in silent endurance and resilience, but reframed through an insistence on real value and real pay, signalling a subtle shift in power.

And it’s not just cheerleaders. 

It’s women everywhere, asking questions brands and businesses can no longer afford to ignore:
What’s the value of our work?