It’s doubtful whether the grammatical category of gender exists in Modern English. Gender doesn’t find regular morphological expression.
The distinction of male, female and neuter may correspond to the lexical meaning of the noun:
Masculine (names of male beings) - boy, man, husband, cock, bachelor
Feminine (names of female beings) – girl, woman, wife, cow, hen
Neuter (names of inanimate objects) – table, house.
Gender may be expressed by word-formation:
a) feminine suffixes –ess ( actress, hostess, tigress), -ine (heroine), -ette (usherette)
b) compounds of dif.patterns: 1. N+N stem (boy-friend-girl-friend; a Tom-cat- a Tabby-cat; a doctor-a woman-doctor; a landlord- a landlady); 2. Pronoun+ N (a he-wolf- a she-wolf; a he-cousin-a she-cousin); 3. oppositions of lexemes ( niece-nephew, bull-cow, girl-boy).
There are a lot of nouns in English, that belong to the so-called “common gender” (person, cousin, parent, president, friend, doctor).
There are also some traditional associations of certain nouns with gender:
a) moon and earth are referred as feminine, sun- as masculine.
b) the names of vessels (ship, boat, ice-breaker, steamer) are referred to as feminine.
c) the names of vehicles (car, carriage, coach) may also be referred to as feminine, especially by their owners.
d) the names of countries, if the country is not considered as a mere geographical territory, are referred to as feminine.
All these arguments speak in favour of treating the category of gender in English nouns as not a purely grammatical, but alexico-gram. category, because gender finds a lexical (special suffixes & lexemes) and a gram. expression in the language ( replacing nouns by personal pronouns)