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As a monolingual English speaker, I've always wondered how this works in languages that use gendered pronouns for referring to inanimate objects (French, German, etc.)

Does the classification of nouns into masculine and feminine reflect gender stereotypes at all? Is there a similar movement towards neutral pronouns for all nouns?

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No, not for all nouns. But if the noun refers to a person, there are usually two different nouns for each gender and the male form is often used to include females. There are modern attempts to fix this by introducing a new noun (ending) that includes both male and female (or more) genders.

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