As another speaker of a gendered language (German), I have to say I'm really surprised at this! People seem to somehow just... know... what gender a loanword is going to be, even before any usage is set. For instance, "Fandom" is emphatically neutrum in my head; masculine seems very strange and feminine just sounds *wrong* (and German Google seems to agree with me on it, although considering the feminine article is "die" googling that one is a mite tricky). I have absolutely no idea why. And the fact that it's so seemingly-random and I can't figure out why a specific English word rings as masculine in my head and another as feminine means that I can't ascribe any particular importance to it.

Then again, not all grammatical-gender languages deal with it in the same way. *shrugs*