> There's also the debate in gendered languages over whether one should never use feminine endings on professions, and keep them generic, or always use them for

> There's also the debate in gendered languages over whether one should never use feminine endings on professions, and keep them generic, or always use them for all professions for consistency [...] This is a somewhat different kind of thing. In English, there are plenty of professions with a gendered suffix rather like this. Waiter / waitress; actor / actress; steward / stewardess. In general, the -ess cannot be used for a word that doesn't already exist; the feminist prescription for a female doctor is "lady doctor", not "doctress". You might also note that the masculine versions of those three examples have three different "suffixes". But the agentive suffix is always -er, whether the agent is male or female. Professions are conceptually different, and better modeled as opaque words than as stem+suffix combinations.