I’ve flagged your comment because it’s essentially inviting a flame war, on top of being utterly irrelevant to the topic. 10 seconds on Wikipedia would have an

I’ve flagged your comment because it’s essentially inviting a flame war, on top of being utterly irrelevant to the topic. 10 seconds on Wikipedia would have answered your question by the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces The reason is that “sauce” is feminine in French. Une sauce. C’est tout. You want to talk about pointlessly gendered, as a French native I agree that the French language, as most other Romance languages, Slavic languages and several Germanic ones, are all pointlessly gendered. I am envious of English natives that don’t have to deal with knowing that a chair is feminine but a stool is masculine, a bank is feminine but a shop is masculine. Or that a book is masculine in French but feminine in Russian, and it’s the other way around for the unknown gender of a domesticated animal!!! Still I would invite you to learn more languages.