It makes pronouns more useful.
"I put the book and the apple on the table. Throw him/her/it away"
If apple is neuter, table is masculine and book is feminine (as is the case in my language) - "him/her/it" is uniquely identifying what you want to throw away. In fact my language goes even further and there are 5 grammatical genders (masculine is subdivided into personal/animate/inanimate). And there are distinctions between fully-feminine plural and mixed plural so you can uniquely identify groups of people with pronouns if one group has males in it and the other one doesn't. Like:
"Eve's sisters met Smiths family yesterday, I invited them(mixed plural=Smiths/feminine only plural=the sisters)"
I agree it's weird when you think about it, possibly not worth it, but I like the quirkiness. It allows for brevity that is very hard to translate properly, especially in dialogs.