I find this absurd. This is natural language processing. What do languages have? Gendered pronouns. Some languages have gendered nouns. We use language to communicate information about our environment.
Whether or not someone is male or female may be irrelevant to how they perform in certain tasks, ie, don't judge someone by their race/gender obviously. However, purposely crippling a natural language processor by removing its ability to use language to determine gender is insanity.
I believe the problem is with the language, which evolved with a not-very-modern concept of gender. Some languages run into problems more so or differently than others. Related is why there's resistance to new gender-neutral pronouns such as "xe" etc. (which I'm not sure are the solution either). There exist social constructs now that English (and other languages, but sometimes differently) just has not evolved to handle properly. Problem is that pronouns hold a very key place in the structure of many languages, affecting tenses and such. Things that evolved organically aren't very "future-proof". I don't know a good solution either, except maybe time.
Whether or not someone is male or female may be irrelevant to how they perform in certain tasks, ie, don't judge someone by their race/gender obviously. However, purposely crippling a natural language processor by removing its ability to use language to determine gender is insanity.