[I'm not OP] Does one have to always make sure not to mention gender in English? I'm from Poland and in Polish you mention it all the time unless you specifically go out of your way not to do so. Before I've seen people criticized for translating "programistka" as "female programmer" and there was that proposal for some NLP library the other day, to drop any functionality detecting gender... And doing that to Polish (or any Slavic) NLP library would make the software useless: emperor/empress,prince/princess,sorcerer/sorceress - it may sound like fantasy to many but this is the reality for language with grammatical gender. I'm not saying there are no biases against women in Eastern Europe, but no one here would find mentioning gender offensive or inappropriate, in fact the opposite is true... I also don't remember such rule being mentioned in my English course.
It's not usual to avoid any mention of gender in English; some people avoid it for political reasons. But when you're translating a gender-marked word into an English equivalent which is not marked for gender, it's not idiomatic to add another word to indicate gender unless it's relevant to the topic at hand.
English lost most of its grammatical gender centuries ago. Since the 1960s and 1970s the parts that remain have become politically fraught in some circles, but usage varies by community. Unless you're deliberately wading into that fight, I'd stick to the way you were taught.
I see, recently I'm seeing people being called out on thoughtlessly mentioning the gender. The 'female programmer' was a lazy translation, agree, but I would've also used 'woman' to describe person who wrote the that e-mail if I know that for a fact that woman was the author and question by kmonsen really got me thinking if that would have wronged someone...
On a side not, I do miss that added context in English, especially in novels, when it's hard to guess just based on the names of the characters. It makes it easier for me to imagine them and evaluate interactions between them.
Perhaps she signed-off her email/post/comment with a female name? You know, it is perfectly reasonable to assume gender when the name is obvious. E.g. the odds of a person called "Samantha" being male are miniscule compared to it being a female. Because in both cases, "it" is a person we are talking about.
We can't just erase gender. People think in gender, and they consequently speak it. I don't think twice about mentioning "some guy" commented on my post, for example. Just the other day I decided to be even and refer to a hypothetical person by using "s/he", and even got called out on it.
