'Françaises, Français': Why the French language need not be so sexist

[Emrys]

12. It does, but in modern English, gender isn't embedded in the grammar as it is in French.

In this case highlighted by the OP, it's more a question of what is considered the default usage.

I've even seen some feminists object to the term (or conventional spelling) of "woman/women" , preferring "womyn" in some cases, as culturally implying that woman is a subset of the term "man".

You're a writer, I'm an editor. In our fields we've probably had to pay more attention than most to these issues.

Various resources have addressed this issue, such as Casey and Swift's Handbook of Nonsexist Writing from way back in 1980, which I've used in the past when working with publishers that were particularly sensitive to these issues or gave we copy-editors the leeway to try to address them. As I noted above, it wasn't a matter of premature "wokeness", much as it was resisted by some authors ("they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun is still something we have to approach with care depending on an author's preconceptions and taste), because some of the usages were set by statute in the US and so were important to observe for a modern American audience.

I therefore have sympathy with the French moves to modernize usages, though I don't know what success they'll have. As you've observed above, France is unusual in having the Académie Française as an official arbiter of proper French usage. Its main focus has been opposing the all-pervasive influence of English in loan words, seeking instead novel French words that have Francophone roots, so it's by its very nature conservative.

But in the end, language is about what people actually speak and write as opposed to sometimes arbitrary rules cooked up at various points by various influential individuals or authorities over the years - the prescriptive versus descriptive tension in linguistics.