'Actress' is a perfectly good word - a rant
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As a person whose first language is Polish I am always disarmed by the English speaking people's (mostly women- I dare admit) insistence on using the unified form for both sexes. After the late '90 when the wave of feminism reached Poland, the exactly reversed trends appeared in our language. As Polish is an insanely inflected language, quite a lot of occupation names had both male and female form. The inflected group might have included more lower qualification jobs, which is understandable given the cultural context and position of women in society in the past. Anyway, more and more often these days the strong bias towards female forms of all professions presents itself in public speech. We suddenly have the 'ministra' and 'professora'; the monstrosities of not-so-conveniently-Latin-derived female-inflections of engineer (inżynierka), prime minister (premierka); and every occupation ending with -ist i.e. psychologist (psycholożka) with a glaring ending. The changes in both directions are surely symptomatic of the shift of the condition of women in society. Perhaps the underlying reason of instigating these informal language reforms is simply a desire of creating an issue if not for debate than for change in perception; a flailing of hands fueled by social needs irreverent about disruption it causes to preciseness and logic of languages. After all we still live in a wage-gapped glass-ceilinged world, which improves slower that the aspirations of its inhabitants rise. And, I must admit, before this annoying PC kerfuffle, when someone spoke to me about an engineer in Polish (uninfected) or a lawyer in English, I automatically assumed they referred to a man. And I was born in the early '90. Sorry for long–windedness. Without 'Dies irae' intro it seems a tad inexcusable of me.
Many comments on this video were from Europeans saying that the problem does not arise in their languages. In Britain, women earn slightly more than men for the same work, and for the roughly 20% of women who are career-focussed, it seems that there is no glass ceiling. If a person in a story is not described as a man or a woman, but you have to picture that person, then you cannot picture both a man and a woman in your head. You have to pick. It is natural to pick whichever is the more likely. This is not a sign of evil, just a sign of being human. If the sex of the character is not relevant, then it doesn't matter, and if it is relevant, then the story-teller ought to mention it.
But is they are equal, why would they have separate words for the same job? I assume the words were differentiated by gender based on functional grounds (you generally don't want to put our an ad saying you are hiring "actors," and then have males turn up when the role being played is female), but we don't have different words for male taxi drivers and female taxi drivers and we have doctors and doctresses. I think the lack of distinction there is because the sex of the person involved is completely irrelevant., yet we do have holdover terms for many jobs that simply could not be female, like firemen and policemen, and of course to Americans (of which I am one,