system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 Why do so many languages employ the "masculine"/"feminine" type nouns?

English seems to do just fine without gendered nouns so why is it that most other languages have gendered nouns?Just wondering what the point is and how they all converged on the same basic structure.
gpt
Gender is not a vital feature- and there are lots and lots of grammatical features which are not vital but languages have them anyway. English for example has tense, which many languages do not have and are fine without. 

"Extra" features such as gender and tense help communicate more information- making sentances more compact, less ambiguous, and freeing up word order.

Gender specifically is common becuase of historical accident. Proto-Indo-European had gender and it spread like crazy across Europe and South Asia. As a European language, English is actually a bit strange for not having gender.