There are movements for gender-inclusive language in almost every language that has grammatical gender, though the extent and favored solutions differ in each.
Wikipedia has a long document discussing gender-inclusive language choices in many languages. Obviously, it's hard to know how prevalent or accepted these are as a foreigner, and as you can see, the specific form they take depends on each countries unique linguistic, cultural, and historical factors. The sum total of these examples, though, should be enough to show that this isn't just an American issue.
Unless otherwise stated, these quotes are from the above Wikipedia page:
German:
There is no universally accepted solution to the trade-off between inclusiveness and wordiness. As a result of campaigns by advocates of feminist language modification, many job advertisements are now formulated so as to explicitly include a grammatically male and a female word (Informatiker oder Informatikerin)
Since the 2010s, a form is sometimes used in academic and feminist circles in which an underscore (_) or an asterisk (*) is inserted just before the gender-specific suffix, as in "liebe_r Student_in" or "liebe*r Student*in" ("dear student"). This form, called Gendergap (not to be confused with the English-language term "gender gap") or Gendersternchen ("gender star") respectively, is meant to convey an "open space" for all gender identities
Terms like Lehrer (teacher) are increasingly being replaced by abstract or collective nouns such as Lehrkraft (teaching force; faculty) or Lehrperson (teach person). Kellner (waiter) and Kellnerin (waitress) are often transformed into Bedienung (service): "Fragen Sie bitte die Bedienung, falls Sie einen Wunsch haben" ("If you need anything, ask the service/help").
This article from Smithsonian Magazine talks further about the efforts and difficulties with gender neutrality in German.
Swedish:
Hen is a gender-neutral personal pronoun in Swedish intended to replace the gender-specific hon ("she") and han ("he") to some extent ... with reference to the Finnish hän, a personal pronoun that is gender-neutral, since Finnish does not have grammatical genders. ... Since 2015 hen is included in Svenska Akademiens ordlista, the official glossary of the Swedish Academy
A subtler strategy of gender-neutralizing pronouns is the replacement of man (which means either man or one, as in: One ought to gender-neutralize pronouns) with en (which, literally translated, means one). The problem with this is that en is already used in some dialects and contexts as a replacement for man, and some native speakers of Swedish would thus consider the word as belonging to regional or low-prestige language.
Icelandic:
The policy of gender neutrality in the Icelandic language is that the speaker uses the normal grammatical gender of the word of a public office or another office, no matter the gender of the holder. For example, the masculine words president and minister (forseti and ráðherra) were used when Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was the president of Iceland.
French:
The use of non-gendered job titles in French is common and generally standard practice among the francophones in Belgium and in Canada. By law in Quebec, the use of gender-inclusive job titles is obligatory if the writer has not opted for gender-free terms.
To make words or phrases gender-inclusive, French-speakers use two methods:
- hyphens, brackets or capital letters to insert feminine endings: étudiant-e-s, , étudiant·e·s, étudiant(e)s or étudiantEs (the brackets method is now often considered sexist, because brackets are used to show something less important) ; most writers avoid this practice in official titles such as Governor General and favor the next process;
- hendiadys containing a feminine word and a masculine word: toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens.
Spanish
There seems to be more available information (at least in English) about Spanish:
Two methods have begun to come into use. One of them, seen most often in Spain, Mexico and Argentina, is to use the at-sign (@) or the letter x to replace -o or -a, but use of the slash (/) as in (el/la candidato/a) is more common. The ligature æ can be used in the same way (escritoræs for writers of two genders, although escritores/as is more common)
Some Spanish-speaking people advocate for the use of elle/elles. Its former use is similar to Spanish lo (alive in Portuguese) and ello, which cannot be used for objects, non-human living beings or people, as there are no neuter nouns or descriptive adjectives in Ibero-Romance languages. Despite this, some still employ this pronoun in a gender-neutral personal third pronoun fashion, even if not allowed according to the historical use and etymology of the now-defunct word (in the spirit of a revival of the neuter form in early Romance that died off in most Romance languages).
Some politicians have begun to avoid perceived sexism in their speeches; the Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada, for example, was famous for repeating gendered nouns in their masculine and feminine versions (ciudadanos y ciudadanas)
Some evidence for similar efforts and backlash to the US:
Spanish bid for gender neutral constitution sparks row
Last week, Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo asked the Academy to study updating the 1978 constitution with "inclusive" language
Serbo-Coration
Advocates of gender-neutral language find it difficult to avoid specifying gender in Serbian, since it is so built into the language. But one area where they have a bit more flexibility is the word "person," in its various forms: a person can be referred to as човек čovek ("human"; masculine gender), особа osoba ("person"; feminine gender) or људско биће ljudsko biće ("human being"; neuter gender).
Russian
In Russian, it seems like the push for gender neutral language has taken the route of "unmarking" the masculine gender, so it can be used in a gender neutral sense:
Job titles have a masculine and a feminine version in Russian, though in most cases the feminine version is only used in colloquial speech. The masculine form is typically treated as "unmarked", i.e. it does not necessarily imply that the person is male, while the feminine form is "marked" and can only be used when referring to a woman. ... Even in cases where the feminine term is not seen as derogatory, however, there is a growing tendency to use masculine terms in more formal contexts that stress the individual's membership in a profession.
For this reason, use of the masculine occupation terms when referring to women, is in fact seen as more politically correct and constitutes a growing trend.
Comments from actual Russians suggest that gender-neutrality in Russian actually has a much longer history and the use of the “unmarked” masculine gender has been uncontentious (in a way it isn’t in English) for a long time:
Regarding Russia: it's not a new trend, same language (with a single word being used for a profession regardless of gender) was used for at least a century. It was pushed a lot after the revolution, but was pretty normal even before. -- Alice
Estonian:
According to this article, Estonian has a gender-neutral pronoun tema:
A young Estonian agender person interviewed for this article who prefers the name Paul does find “tema,” the genderless Estonian pronoun, helpful. Temais used only for humans, and when used in a sentence, it is neither masculine nor feminine.
“Usually people use the gender-neutral ‘tema’ [when] talking about any person, and because it’s the most common way to refer to a person, there is no issue with which pronoun to use.
Finnish:
Finnish only has a single, un-gendered pronoun:
Finnish has only gender-neutral pronouns and completely lacks grammatical gender. The word hän is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". As in Estonian, the suffix -tar or -tär can be added to some words (mostly professions) to make them feminine if required, for example näyttelijä (actor), näyttelijätär (actress), but these forms are not commonly used any more; using the basic word for all genders, equally meaning female/male professions (näyttelijä for f/m actors) is the norm.
In the comments @JiK adds that there is a public discussion about developing gender-inclusive forms of profession names that contain a gender (similar to using firefighter instead of fireman):
many actually used profession names end with -mies (-man, such as fireman, chairman etc.), and there is actually public discussion about changing those. For example, one of the biggest newspapers in Finland announced two years ago that they will try to avoid using those names in the future -- JiK
