'Françaises, Français': Why the French language need not be so sexist

[Emrys]

30. Yes, there are nuances there.

I was trying above to avoid the possibility of the thread getting bogged down by confusion over grammatical versus physical gender, which seemed a possibility at the start.

This Psychology Today article discusses some of the issues you raise: "Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters) Gender in language affects cognitive processing" (it's German versus Spanish in the experiment cited).

Whether and how much it matters touches on issues of whether being either masculine or feminine is in itself a good/bad thing, and that's a wider (and potentially thornier) cultural question. Being aware of these aspects can hardly be a bad thing, though.

What you've described has similarities to other unconscious effects of language, like the "bouba-kiki" effect.