It would seem that in all language groups, distinguishing between male and female when referring to persons is important, if not critical.

I guess not all languages do it. In Turkish the third person singular is just one word, used for males, females, or objects. This has caused great confusion for my Turkish friend who's learning English. We constantly argue about whether or not it's terribly useful to know the gender of the person you're referring to by a pronoun (she, of course, argues it's irrelevant). When she's excited and talks fast, she just picks random pronouns, so she'll say sentences like "I was talking to my mother yesterday and he said..." Eventually you get into the habit of filtering this out.