But of course as anyone who has ever learned any French knows, gender seems to have very little to do with sexism or indeed with sex. And here to attempt to explain this anomaly is Sandy Newman, Professor of French at the University of New South Wales. Our chortling was not, I suspect, aimed at the doubtless admirable, undoubtedly politically correct intentions, but at the outrage of reactionary indignation from bodies such as the Academie Francaise. I will not talk about origins of grammatical gender, which are hidden in the mists of time. Except to say that the grammatical gender is undoubtedly related to the expression of sex differences.
Some languages have a neuter category, which is helpful for dealing with the inanimate world.
Otherwise, usage has attributed the feminine or the masculine category to words for a variety of reasons pertaining to form, to analogy, or to etymology. For instance, a new word ending in 'ion' like 'permission' or 'position', will be felt as feminine because of its form. The American CIA is known in French as 'la CIA' with the feminine article 'la' because they know that the key word is 'Agency' which is assimilated to the French feminine word 'Agence'. Whereas 'KGB' was masculine. In relatively recent times, 'automobile' hesitated for a long time between genders before settling down as feminine, 'une auto', around 1920.