This article explores the role of metaphor in creating the gender aspect of the worldview as well as the phenomenon of metaphorical gender when the 'male' and 'female' characteristics are detached from entities which are differentiated by their real gender and transferred to other phenomena based on associations involving 'masculinity' and 'femininity' which are typical for a specific culture. The hypothesis is set out that gender metaphor may be encoded in the grammatical system of languages, motivating thus the formal grammatical gender of nouns.