Let’s imagine for a moment an artificial language where every word with a positive connotation (such as “good”, “love”, “safety”, “food”, etc) is of the female gender and everything negative and unpleasant (“sickness”, “death”, “hunger”, “despair”) is masculine. In such a situation, would it be possible that after internalizing the idea that feminine equals good, masculine equals bad, this wouldn’t reflect how members of that society view men and women? While the previous example is purely hypothetical, there are less extreme examples out there. Southeast England, the Ket language for example, you will find that objects that are important to society tend to be masculine and things of no importance are feminine.
Even without such obvious examples, grammatical genders seem to have an effect on how people view the world. While they’re only supposed to be a way of classifying nouns, dividing words into feminine and masculine will undoubtedly create a connection to real-world females and males. When Russian speakers (a language with grammatical genders) were asked to imagine days of the week as people, the subjects consistently imagined grammatically masculine days as male and grammatically feminine days as female, without giving an explanation as to how they came up with their characterisation.
While this particular example might seem like a very abstract task, it is easy to see how filtering the world through a lens of masculine vs feminine, male vs female can lead to some very ingrained biases. You can actually see the same effect at work in art galleries where artists must decide how to personify abstract concepts. It turns out that when they choose to turn Death, Love, or Time into either a man or a woman, 85% of the time the artist will choose the gender that matches with the word’s grammatical one in their native language.
“Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.” By Bertrand Russell