Must have been a long time ago, because efforts to remove "he" as the default gender have been ongoing for years (80s?) and everybody has more or less settled on they rather than the awkward he/she.
Chinese and Japanese also do not have grammatical gender. Chinese imported gendered pronouns about a century ago for ease of translating Western gendered languages, but both languages tend to either refer to people by name or have no word at all and infer from sentence structure.
