There have been various attempts to "neutralize" the French language in the past, without much success. There are many reasons for that, some of them cultural a

There have been various attempts to "neutralize" the French language in the past, without much success. There are many reasons for that, some of them cultural and political, but it's also a problem from a purely grammatical perspective. French is much more gendered than English, nouns, adjectives and certain verbal constructions reflect one of the two genders. Thus "eroding" an arbitrary selection of words to stop having them reflect gender doesn't flow very naturally in the language. "Une boulanger", "un hotesse", "une acteur" etc... All that is very grating to the ear and somewhat un-french sounding. It basically breaks very common patterns in the language that every French speaker consciously or unconsciously integrated as part of learning French. Compare for instance: Un boulanger fier (a proud baker, male) Une boulangère fière (a proud baker, female) Note that both the adjective "fier" and the noun "boulanger" decline similarly. If you "erode" boulanger to be neutral you end up with: Un boulanger fier Une boulanger fière Suddenly the pattern is broken. Do we erode "fier" and similar adjectives as well to remain consistent? But then of course it has a cascading effect throughout the language. I'm not saying that this means that it cannot or shouldn't be improved, I dislike the heavy knee-jerk backlash every proposed reform of French grammar gets (no matter how small and obvious it is, like simplifying some ridiculous rules for the accord of the passé composé) but it's definitely a complex topic.