Giving inanimate objects gender

As someone who has always enjoyed languages, and even etymology (the study of words), and who speaks three languages on a regular basis - English (my mother tongue), Portuguese (for 6 months of the year in Brazil), and Spanish (6 months of the year in Peru) - I am constantly struggling with the gender of inanimate objects!
In English we use "the", "a/an" and "it" to describe anything inanimate - so we talk about "the table", "the car", "the road", and refer to them all as "it", but many languages have allocated gender to everything so in Spanish and Portuguese they talk about "la mesa" and "a mesa", "el coche" and "o carro", and "la calle" and "a rua". So in Portuguese and Spanish table and road is female (a and la) and car is masculine (o and el), and they would also use him and her when referring to these inanimate items. As a general rule if the word ends in "o" it will be male, and "a" will be female - but as can be seen in the examples I used "coche" and "calle", both end in "e" but are different genders! It makes for difficulties for foreigners in these countries.
I did a little research on this and found that there are scores of languages that fall into the gender/no gender categories, and some that have 3 genders (including neuter) like German ("die", "das" and "der") and Russian. Notable in the gender-less category alongside English, are Chinese and Japanese, and in the gender category, with Spanish and Portuguese, are French and Arabic.
Mark Twain once wrote about German: “A person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it! A person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all…”
Apparently much of this stems from the earliest days of human language when certain tasks were considered to "belong" to the male of the species (like hunting) and others to females (like making food) and so the utensils for these tasks acquired the masculine or feminine identifier. Yes, extremely sexist, and even more so that many languages retain these distinctions today, and one article I read claimed that most of the languages that retain gender identification of inanimate objects have the worst records of sexual equality, so maybe there is some correlation.
English used to have gendered nouns, too, but these disappeared during the Middle English period, between 1100 AD and 1500 AD - though I understand now that it not politically correct to use AD and BC, as these refer to Christ (who is only relevant to Christians, and not to the other billions of people on the planet), so we now must use BCE and CE - Before Common Era and Common Era! It means the same thing but doesn't "insult" non-Christians.
There are always exceptions to every grammatical rule and I will end with two amusing ones - in Spanish "masculinity" is "la masculinidade", which is feminine, and in Portuguese "voluptuous woman" is "o mulherão", which is masculine! Give me a simple "the" any day!