Can women be firemen or mailmen?

[bedstuy]

Are there female firefighters?  I never heard of such a thing.

But, I think the easiest default is to use things like firefighter or mail carrier, if there's a good non-gendered word.  If there's a good gendered word like sculptress, executrix or chairman that has a nice ring to it, go with that.  For the female chairman, I think we're just stuck with awkward, bad sounding words.  Chairlady, chairwoman, chair, chairperson, all sound terrible. 

[bedstuy]

In languages like German and Swedish the word for human is more obviously related to the word for man which makes it a bit easier to accept this stuff (mensch/mann/männer, etc)

English is complicated by Latin.  Man is from the latin word for hand, and the german word for human.  So we end up with older words like manipulate, manumission, and manual having something to do with handling, and newer words like mancrush, manpurse, and mancave, all having to do with masculinity.  We also have Manhattan, which has nothing to do with either of those things. 

You clearly haven't been to the same bars in Manhattan that I have.