This is a well-studied phenomenon: explicit grammatical gender vs implicit gender.
To illustrate this: the Thames is not grammatically male. There are two reasons that people report report "male" in cases like you mention:
- Neuter was not given as an option. In such cases, neuter concepts tends to default to masculine, which is one of the more nuanced parts of the "default to masculine" idea I mentioned.
- In ungendered language, people still do semantic categorization. When pressed, they can consider the salient features of an idea, compare it to their internal model of gender traits, and pick whichever one lines up better. In this kind of categorization, people seldom choose "none of the above" as a category, because our minds are naturally pattern-seeking, and none-of-the-above denotes the lack of a pattern.
But this is not grammatical gender, because those implicit-gender assumptions are cancelable. I can refer to the Thames as "she," and people will accept is as grammatical. Stilted and poetic, and possibly odd, but grammatical.
The best example I can think of for this is the English word nurse. It is unmarked for gender, and can refer to a man or a woman grammatically with no issues ("He's a nurse"). But you sometimes see the odd construction male nurse, because the term often semantically categorizes as feminine and there are cases where you want to explicitly override that assumption.
Female nurse, while even less common, is also grammatical. If nurse were grammatically gendered, at least one of these constructions would not be permitted.
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