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Notes -
There is barely one in English either, to be honest. It seems to have been shoehorned retroactively because the sex descriptors are adjectives -- "female" as a noun is, er, quite objectifying as used, and I can see why it upsets some feminists -- and the gender descriptors are nouns: "woman [career]" is awkward too.
English doesn't seem to gender its nouns anyways though? French does it, but English doesn't seem to. The only ones that come to mind are referring to ships or countries as "she".
Worth keeping in mind, I think, that the grammatical gender of nouns in Romance languages is essentially arbitrary and has no relation with sex or socio-sexual gender. In Italian, knives (coltelli) and spoons (cucchiai) are masculine, while forks (forchette) are feminine; a table is masculine when you are working on it (tavolo) and feminine when you are eating on it (tavola); one egg (uovo) is masculine, but two eggs (uova) are feminine; bones may be masculine if they are scattered (ossi) but are always feminine if they are part of a set (ossa); female bumblebees are masculine (bombi), while male giraffes (giraffe) are feminine; and so on. As far as I know, that's the case for other Romance languages as well.
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There was a comment pointing out a few weeks ago about French's gendered nouns being 'neutral' and 'feminine' so I feel obligated to point it out even though I can't find it at the moment.
It does when you want to use an indefinite article, but nobody calls it gender even though it serves the same linguistic purpose.
English's indefinite articles are not gendered (a, an). Pronouns have something you could call "gender" (though I think it is not), and nouns have that thing too (in that there's a pronoun that agrees with them) but no gender markers (aside from borrowings, mostly from French). And in general the English vestigal "gender" is only used to match with biological sex, except things like ships and (sometimes) countries.
The fact that there are two of them serves the same linguistic purpose.
The a/an distinction is exactly like the le/la or un/une distinction in that it's fundamentally a smoothing tool to make the language sound correct when spoken, and is something you just end up getting a feel for after a while because you know by the character of the language which category you're in. (And "gender" is... kind of an ideal way to describe that.)
If we didn't have an in addition to a we would have a glottal stop instead, which isn't really natural in English outside of a few regional dialects.
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"Make the language sound correct" is absolutely not the reason why nouns have gender in Romance languages. They just have it because Latin did. That's it.
And as a native speaker of a Romance language, I can assure you that in my mind, inanimate objects "are" the gender of they word in my language. Same for most speakers of Romance languages, AFAICT.
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In English it's not about "sounding correct" it's about it being easier to pronounce.
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