This is a really important point, and a big part of what makes this such a problem is the extent to which men are socialised to not read male behavioural cues as being potentially sexual or romantic generally, and especially not when directed at other men. As I remember vividly from high school, the no homo fear ran deep enough for most guys that accusing another guy of being attracted to them or coming onto them - even as a joke - was verboten, because it signalled to everyone that they’d been thinking about gay men, and was therefore more likely to backfire when this was pointed out (and it inevitably was) than to succeed.
So what you have, then, is this perfect collision where women, as the OP says, are raised in a culture that necessitates their paying very close attention to male romantic and sexual cues as a simple survival reflex, but where men are taught to unsee and deny the existence of such cues unless they’re directed grossly, suggestively and obviously towards women (whose cues of disinterest, fear or rejection they’re seldom taught to respect, either). And meanwhile, because this same culture assumes that relationships between women are always going to be emotional and intense and tactile, we all get taught to misread the same romantic and sexual cues that pass between women as being irrevocably platonic, no matter how extreme, which is also part of why there’s so much femslash blindness in shipping. (The other, larger part, of course, is the dearth of well-written female characters who routinely and meaningfully interact with each other. But I digress.)
So: while there are some, let’s call them suggestive behavioural cues which are base commonalities of human interaction, regardless of the gender of the participants - things like intense eye contact, or standing too close, or certain types of speech or touching, or finding excuses to touch - which, depending on the context, might be either romantic, sexual or platonic with roughly equal frequency, there’s a massive asymmetry to how we’re trained to perceive them. Thus
F/F: suggestive cues made visible and/or encouraged, read as platonic to deny romantic/sexual interpretations
M/M: suggestive cues made invisible and/or discouraged, read as platonic to deny romantic/sexual interpretations
F/M: suggestive cues made visible and/or encouraged, read as romantic/sexual to deny platonic interpretations
The added complication in the F/M spectrum is that, whereas women learn early on to pay very close attention to male behavioural cues, to read them comprehensively and to assume a sexual motive ahead of a romantic one, men are simultaneously taught to pay little attention to female behavioural cues, to either disregard them or to interpret them with frightening inaccuracy (not because inaccuracy is the aim, but because the sexist logic underpinning the lessons can’t achieve any other outcome; see elsewhere re: the literal entirety of rape culture), and to assume a romantic motive ahead of a sexual one (but to really, really hope for a sexual one).
This is why you get so much lazy visual storytelling wherein the potential for a romantic heterosexual romance is “established” by little more than putting a single female character in the vicinity of a male protagonist and having them interact: by default, the woman’s presence is deemed to have romantic narrative significance until or unless explicitly stated otherwise (and even then, people struggle with it). By the same token, two female characters can spend the night in the same bed, cuddling, and our first assumption is meant to be close platonic friendship; but if two male characters do the same thing - well. Once upon a time, that actually used to happen quite a bit in films and on TV (see, for instance, Charters and Caldicott in The Lady Vanishes), because the cultural implication used to be a platonic one; but now that we live in the Era of No Homo, you very rarely see guys do this precisely because it’s assumed to be purely sexual.
Thus: it’s not just that women, by and large, are socialised to pay very close attention to suggestive male behavioural cues - it’s that men are actively discouraged from doing likewise, and so can recreate those same cues between each other in a way that’s highly visible to female outsiders, but often invisible to the men themselves, whether as participants or viewers.
(There’s a more in-depth, complicated point to be made here about queer analysis and interpretation vs straight and the extent to which queer male readings of the same scenes often mirror those of both straight and queer women, but not straight men, with the major skew factors being self-repression and denial, but it’s late, and I’m tired, and, well, this sentence kinda gives you the basics.)
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