In Swedish, profession nouns favour gender neutrality (Swedish: professor), whereas in Romance languages gender specification is favoured (French: professeur vs. professeure, Italian: professore vs. professoressa, Spanish: profesor vs. profesora).
In Swedish and French there are gender neutral neopronouns (Swedish: hen, French: iel), corresponding to English they + singular.
Why are there different strategies?
In general I agree with you. However, Swedish has grammatical gender: the common gender (historically corresponding to the masculine and feminine gender in Romance languages) and the neuter, that must not be mistaken for the gender strategy called gender neutrality. So today, applying this gender strategy only författare ('author') is used, but not so long ago författare (French: auteur) and författarinna (French: autrice) were used, illustrating the gender strategy called gender specification. These Swedish nouns have the same grammatical gender: the common gender. This is shown by the indefinite article en as an agreement receiver from the agreement giving noun: en författare (French: un auteur), en författarinna (French: une autrice).
In sum, the relationship between gender strategies and grammatical gender is rather complicated and more research is needed.
Se my preprint: Preprint Grammatiskt och semantiskt genus i svenska och franska med k...
The article is in Swedish, but there are long summaries in English and French at the end of the article.
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