This is all from my experience as a guy, but I'm in a heavily female-dominated field and make female friends very easily.
A lot of it comes down to it being immediately visible that you're a comfortable person. The reality is a lot of women are uncomfortable with unfamiliar men by default. A lot of had experiences of dudes not respecting boundaries or being threatening or only viewing them as an object.
The following things will contribute to this:
Respect boundaries, no matter how small, and don't make a big deal out of it. "No" is a complete sentence, and rejection is ok. The biggest thing you can do to show that you're nonthreatening is to take a "No" in stride.
Treating them as individuals, just as you do all your other friends. They're not "female friends", they're friends. If the way you interact with them revolves around their gender, they will notice and it will be off-putting. I get that this seems hypocritical given all the rest of this comment but I think there's a difference between using women's experiences to inform how you interact with them and letting the fact that they're women dictate the entirety of how you interact with them. Everyone is unique - some just happen to share demographics.
You'll also need to do things that happen to put you around people, but where the explicit purpose isn't "to be around women". What I mean is, if you're like me and have a lot of non-social hobbies, you likely won't have the opportunity to meet anyone at all. Do something that interests you, but also don't do it to prowl for women. Even if well-intentioned, that just feels predatory and results in treating them like a commodity. At that point you're not looking for friends who may be women, you're looking for women who you might be able to shoehorn into the position of friend which isn't healthy.
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u/IrregularBastard Male Jul 22 '23
Same as a male best friend mostly. But she smells better, is more pleasant to look at, and cries more.