Totally agree with your statement that gender issues are a factor in global economics, and that we should strive to use gender-neutral phrasing whenever practical.
Gendered language is kind of a thorny issue for the English language. Not all languages are like English. Japanese and Farsi default to gender-neutral pronouns and cultures that default to calling people by their family name instead of their given name also sidestep a lot of these issues.
The US had a women-only baseball league during World War II and someone said (or somewhere I read) that it was the era of radio broadcasts and baseball defaults to referring to players by their last names, so listening to a game of baseball with women-only was experientially nearly identical to listening to men's baseball:
"And Smith is up to bat and knocks it out of the park for a home run, winning the game!"
It's probably a fiercely fought battle with English because it's the default lingua franca for the world and doesn't play well with a lot of cultures that feel forced to use it. Various proposals for fixing it come from interest groups rather than arising naturally in an emergent fashion and strike people as unnatural, top-down solutions to a problem they personally may not have, so see no reason to pursue.
/off-topic tangent, oops, because linguistics and social issues are both interests of mine