The paper focuses on gender processing in bilinguals, exploring the so-called gender-congruency effect across two languages, investigating the factors that might influence the phenomenon, namely the similarity of the gender systems across languages, the need to retrieve grammatical gender for the task, and the role of noun concreteness as a semantic variable. Two experiments were carried out to this end. In the first one, Russian-Spanish bilinguals were tested through a noun translation task, displaying gender-congruency effect higher in the case of concrete nouns. A similar result was obtained in the second experiment, where Italian-Spanish bilinguals showed the effect regardless of the translation task, and more prominently in the case of concrete nouns. The proximity of bilingual gender systems and the relationship between semantics and gender are discussed with reference to these results.