but not necessarily about the nobility of the gender etc etc. Grammatical gender is a bit of a mystery. Usually the natural gender if there is one will correspond in French (la reine, le roi), and I don't know of any cases where it doesn't, but not so in Latin, where "nauta," "poeta," "agricola" etc are masculine first-declension nouns, i.e. they have feminine forms but masculine natural gender.
Fortunately languages evolve, and many if not most professions, which were previously masculine, whatever the gender of the actual person (le docteur, le professeur), have developed feminine forms, in Quebec it seems moreso than in France, but there too. So the NYT article might be exaggerating for dramatic effect, or maybe the writer had a chauvinistic teacher, which is not hard to imagine.
In any case students are always interested in this so merci beaucoup! 
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