in case anyone was curious.

Your question is an excellent one, and one that I have asked myself often. But there just isn't a really satisfying answer beyond the fact that it's a matter of historical inheritance from Latin. In remote linguistic history, before Latin existed, and in its ancestor language, there was a semantically-based distinction between animate and inanimate (or 'neuter'). Later on, 'animate' acquired a distinction between male and female, again originally motivated by the 'sex' of the referent. But this system rapidly became 'grammaticalized' or 'lexicalized' (in the sense that the gender of a word is largely a matter of convention). In Latin - a free word order language - gender agreement between nouns and adjectives or pronouns may have helped to 'keep track' of the relations between words even if they were not adjacent to each other. But the more rigid word order of Romance makes this less advantageous. Romance languages could do without gender, but it's a matter of historical inheritance. Some, indeed, behave very strangely in this respect: in Romanian for example thousands of words are masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural! In some languages (e.g., Italian) differences of gender are also correlated with such things as 'size' (where, surprisingly, feminines are larger than masculines), and so forth. I could go on ad nauseam, but if you want to know
more let me know.