I have been wondering how nations where the language makes much of gender (including nouns that are not obviously sexy) are coping with the present demand for gender-neutral (as opposed to neuter gender) pronouns.
Not very well... Even the nouns cause us problems.
E.g. in German, "Student" means student, and "Studentin" means female student. "Studenten" has historically been used to denote the plural, whether talking about a group of male-only students or a mixed group, while "Studentinnen" clearly denotes the plural of the female form. But recent concerns are that females might feel excluded when one talks about "Studenten".
So we are now expected to either write "Student:innen" (and speak it with a glottal stop at the colon), or use "Studierende" as a workaround. The latter means "those who study", which happens to be what the undesirable "Studenten" means as well -- don't ask...
Regarding pronouns, we don't have an equivalent of the English "they" or "them" (used to designate a neutral singular). At least nothing has arrived in the mainstream yet; some very progressive ideas have been suggested but thankfully have not caught on.
Well, ultimately the problem is that it’s impossible to make everyone happy.
English is not devoid of gender-specific nouns for professions or roles. Actor/actress, steward/stewardess, and aviator/aviatrix are classic examples, but there are more obscure ones like seamster/seamstress. In many cases, one or the other form fell out of use organically (like aviatrix and seamster). In others, like actress, it’s been deliberate.
But in the end you can’t win: in many cases where we already had separate forms, like actress, activists argue that the existence of a separate word implies a difference in status between the male and female forms, with the female form of course being assigned lower status. (And that’s ignoring truly disingenuous people doing things like comparing
tailor to
seamstress to claim the female form is lower-status, even though those are two related, but distinct, professions.) And then in the cases where we didn’t originally have separate forms (like fireman), they argued that by
not having it, we are ignoring the existence of women who work in those fields.
(That of course is why in some cases, we just switched to different phrases altogether, like firefighter, police officer, and flight attendant, all of which had existed for a long time anyway.)
I don’t claim to know what the solution is, neither for English nor German. What I do feel is that a) most people don’t give a shit either way (and studies support this), and that b) the most rabid proponents as well as the most rabid opponents of gender-neutral language get themselves worked into such frenzies that they are incapable of working towards a middle ground that everyone can be happy with. This is not helped by some (mostly right-leaning) political parties deliberately using this as a wedge issue. But I suppose we shouldn’t really explore that topic since it’ll get the thread closed.