Women in recent decades have clamored to get into social spaces traditionally dominated by men and associated with male power and privilege, because these women want to raise their own status to male levels. For example, women want to get on Facebook's board of directors. By contrast, notice women's lack of interest in becoming guards in men's prisons.
Cryonics has a reputation (wrongly) as a rich white man's social space, so why haven't women wanted to colonize the cryonics community for status reasons? (For that matter, why haven't we heard calls for more "diversity" and "vibrancy" in the cryonics movement from minorities' spokespeople?) Instead cryonics acts like "female Kryptonite" much of the time.
You can go to Mike Darwin's and the de Wolfs' essay about cryonics hostile-wives to get about as much insight into the problem as I've read, but I don't see any obvious way to turn this around so that the cryonics movement becomes more women-friendly. I've wondered if we can find a good model by studying new American religious movements in the 19th Century which attracted many women as early adopters, like Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism and Christian Science. Women even played roles in founding Adventism and Christian Science (Ellen White and Mary Baker Eddy, respectively), which makes their examples even more interesting because Western culture has traditionally not accepted women as religious authority figures.
The cryonics idea also has a fiction problem: Three novels I know of which portray cryonics or suspended animation positively all show a man who takes advantage of an underage girl as part of his plan for self-fulfillment, while disregarding the possibility that the girl upon reaching her majority might have other plans for her life. Will McIntosh's story "Bridesicle" in Asimov's magazine a few years ago shows an even more repulsive exploitation of women involving cryonics.
In other words, the cryonics movement would probably benefit by disavowing those kinds of stories and replacing them with ones which treat the womenfolk better.
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.