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For what it's worth, Japanese has also adopted gender-neutral 看護師 in place of 看護婦, which contains a female character.
When I was taking Japanese classes in the late 1980's at a local school here in SF (run by the Buddhist Church of North America, a Japanese-American church which I believe is headquartered here), we almost always had young women as teachers, many of whom were here in SF getting degrees at San Francisco State University to teach English back in Japan. I remember one conversation where, for some reason I've forgotten, someone asked the young woman teacher, obviously a well-educated professional, how one could specify in Japanese that a pilot was a woman, and the teacher replied that it would make no sense, because there were no women pilots!