How to better support women as a guy?

Prefacing this by saying that I'm a woman, so if this isn't the space for me to be posting, please remove my comment.

So first of all, this is a really good question to ask and by sitting down and consciously thinking about this, you're already ahead of the pack-I genuinely want you to be proud of yourself for this, because from the way you wrote it sounds like you may still be a teengaer/college age, and there are full grown men who never reach this level of introspection/self-reflection.

If you want further reading/resources on any of these topics, please let me know-I'm in school to be a librarian and do this for a living, so this is not a burden to me and I enjoy doing it. There is no subject you can ask me for more resources about that will provoke disgust, judgement, or rejection from me.

Off the top of my head some advice I could give:

Call out sexism and misogyny from other men when you hear it/see it. Don't make it the responsibility of the women in the space to call it out/push back on it because in IRL spaces this can be physically dangerous for us, as well as the fact that truly misogynistic men simply do not listen to or have respect for what women say like they do from their male peers/social group/men they respect.

Try to consume more media-books, movies, tv, music, any and all of it-created by women, from the perspective of women. If you want to go challenge mode, look specifically for books written by feminist authors-both fiction and non-fiction. Do your best to try and seek out media that shows women as characters and people in their own right.

When you go looking for the news, try to consume news that focuses/highlights women's issues and concerns.

If a woman in your life says or behaves like a man is making her feel unsafe, take her seriously and do what you can to support her-this could manifest as walking her to her car in a parking garage, or sticking around as public support if she's breaking up with a nasty ex or making a point to be physically present when he's around if this is someone she needs to interact with regularly. Men have a tendency to downplay or minimize these fears because they don't see it or feel it, but women generally have a finely honed sense for this kind of thing because the stakes for getting it wrong are life-or-death (or worse) for us, and predatory men often back off/leave/turn down their behavior when another man is present. I have had male coworkers wait with me for rides in dark parking lots, and my partner act as a buffer between me and creepy men just by his mere presence and it means the world to us

Try to familiarize yourself with the microaggressions women face, and how those look different in different spaces-the microaggressions women deal with in domestic life (such as being addressed as "Mom" or "Mama" by authority figures instead of by her name or being treated by schools as the default parent), the work place (such as always being considered the default note taker/"office mom" or having credir for ideas stolen), and academia (such as not being called on for questions, chosen for prestigious lab assignments/internships/research work, or being condescended to about their capability) all look different, but stem from the same place. There's also a concept in feminist thought (really Black feminist but I'm already in the weeds with it) called double jeopardy-this states that WoC are uniquely discriminated against both by sexism on the basis of being women and by their race and these two interlock and shape each other. For example, the sexism I face as a woman who passes as white and the racialized sexism I face as an Indigenous woman are similar, but not the same, and they're interlinked with each other.

If you consider yourself a religious person or have cultural/social ties to a faith community, look at what feminist readings of your faith look like-Islamic feminism, Jewish feminism, and Christian feminism all exist, and they look at these religions both from the perspective of women and women's place in them.

Treat your female friends like people-I have male friends, and the reason they are my friends and stay my friends is that when I express "non-traditional" or "non-feminine" interests (manga or anime, violent media, sports, weightlifting) the response is genuine support and "fuck yeah let's go!!".

Learn about concepts like "weaponized incompetence", "emotional labor", the mental load, and the "second shift", "the pink tax" and "the glass ceiling/glass escalator".

If you're sexually attracted to women, learn about women's reproductive and sexual anatomy, about the female cycle of arousal, of the common disorders that can affect those organs and what they look like. If you plan on having children with a woman one day, get ahead of things now by reading about the effects that pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding can have on the female body-there are a horrifying amount of men out there who act like all of those things are basically NBD medically and psychologically. You may live somewhere that has a strong disgust/hygiene taboo around menstruation-working on breaking that down will do you and the women in your life a world of good.

Linked to the above, if you consume porn, look for porn that's ethically made and made by women, that pays it's performers well and is transparent about it's standards for how it's performers are treated before, during, and after shooting, and how scenes are conceived of, conceptualized, shot, and distributed. When you have money, this often looks like paying for your porn.

This is going to be a hard one, but accepting the fact that you were raised to participate in and support rape culture-we all were to some extent, this is unavoidable because of the culture we live in and does not make you a bad person. Do your best to really dig into what rape culture actually looks like where you are and how it manifests itself (different cultures perform rape culture in different ways), and the different ways men and women participate in it.