These women perform grueling dance routines that require up to 15 hours of practice a week — a commitment of time and energy for which they're often underpaid and under appreciated. Here's a closer look at how the NFL's cheerleader uniforms have evolved over the decades. Source: ESPN. Source: Sports Illustrated ; Business Insider.

NFL cheerleaders open to settling discrimination claims

Possible Legal Ramifications
The result was her very first six-pack, a tangible sign of her discipline. She hoped that six-pack would help her make the cut—her own month on the calendar. They greeted team sponsors and Saints employees, but mostly they whispered about who might get a month this year. The first sign of trouble was the team photo—four rows of smiling women in white bikinis—projected across the backdrop of the ballroom stage. Throughout the course of the night, each page of the month calendar was revealed for the first time, January through April
N.F.L. Cheerleaders and the Gender Gap
Or should be. Cheerleaders actually led cheers. Drexel Bradshaw, a lawyer who has represented cheerleaders in fair-pay lawsuits against the NFL, calls both cheerleader pay and treatment sexist exploitation. Degrading monthly weigh-ins. Bizarre handbook instructions on dining etiquette, hygiene, tanning, and manicures.
Few look it: most are lithe and fit from a lifetime of exercise. Now they are buzzing around a banquet hall set up in a club-seating deck on the upper level of Nissan Stadium in Nashville, home of the Tennessee Titans. There are nearly former N. There are sparkles on dresses, sparkles on earrings, sparkles on stilettos. The ex-cheerleaders have been drawn here by their shared past—a collective nostalgia for their days on the sidelines, their moment in the spotlight. But despite their giddiness at being re-united, they know there is no escaping the present. Over the past year , the N. Five former members of the Washington Redskins squad say the team flew them to Costa Rica in , stripped them of their passports, and required them to pose topless before wealthy fans.