The topics discussed in the present chapter lay the foundations for my experimental study in Chaps. 4 and 5, which evaluates whether masculine grammatical gender is interpreted as referring to biological/social male gender when reference is made to humans. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to introduce the concept of grammatical gender in general and its role in the French language specifically. More precisely, Sect. 2.1 distinguishes grammatical gender from biological/social gender, defines grammatical gender from a formal and a psycholinguistic view and presents an index that investigates the correlation between grammatical and biological/social gender across different languages.