While I like the theory, its cute, I dont know that that's true. L'automobile is male in Italian and Spanish. And its easy for a native speaker in either language to come up with numerous examples.
In fact gender really is just grammar. We shouldn't see much into it trying to project ourselves into it. Otherwise, why can the same object have different genders through synonyms? Again:
La macchina L'automobile.
La yerba (granted in Spanish its lost its meaning as grass) El cesped
La nave Il barco
La embarcación El bote
Or changes from the addition of a mere diminutive:
Il banco La bancarella
Il barco La barchetta
Gender is just a classification, largely binary (although Spanish retains the neuter) that got the unfortunate sexual labels of male and female
What? LA automobile is female.
> Il barco La barchetta
"IL barco" doesn't mean anything, it's "LA barca" which, again, is female.
I'd say that generally speaking "it's female when they contain people" is correct, but of course not always (LO ufficio = the office).
Going by the languages I have some knowledge of, that doesn't hold true for Portuguese, where the word "country" itself is masculine but the truth is different countries have different genders. I guess it would be the same for other latin languages? (at least for Spanish). German is also the same but the word "country" is neutral.
I guess it does somewhat hold true for my native language, Hebrew, where all the words you specified but "house" are feminine. So I guess it might also hold true for Arabic then?
English doesn't have gendered nouns, but this linguistic quirk runs deep enough in human psychology that we do sometimes use female pronouns to describe these things. Examples: "She's a beauty" (of a car), or "America and her allies."