All German names for countries are neuter, except for those who have some kind of preposition (e.g. Republic of …).
Yes, it’s the same situation with German. Learners get all upset when they learn “the girl” is “Das Mädchen” which is neuter, and say there is something about German that doesn’t recognize girls as being female, but grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender – Mädchen ends with “chen” which is a neuter word ending. You can’t read anything into it.
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So the countries become gendered according to the gendered words in their names.
Can someone explain to me why words are gendered?
I feel like I should know this by now.
Ooh, that’s a big question, which goes ultimately to the question of how languages develop in the first place.
I think the consensus is that standard grammar developed quite late, and that originally, effectively every noun had many different forms, indicating different functions. English is very unusual in having given almost all of this up, but for many languages, variations the form of the word, rather than syntax, are used to indicate meaning. Most Germanic languages have many different forms to indicate different functions and some languages have even more (Finnish has fourteen if memory serves).
But over a long enough period of time, you start to get standardisation into classes and types of words. What are called “irregular” nouns and verbs - “to be” is the classic in all languages - retain their traditional forms, but others get progressively hammered into shape according to different rules. In some relatively isolated African languages you can still see the this process going on. After a while, classes develop which have their specific rules for how words change according to function, and grammarians have called these classes “genders” for no real reason, except that many (but by no means all) words relating to masculine or feminine biological functions and activities tend to have the same pattenr. But German, as we have seen has three genders, and other languages have at least four. It’s doubtful whether it really makes sense to talk about them as “genders” at all.
French, like most other Romance languages, has largely abandoned grammatical variations, except for singular and plural. It’s kept gender, but reduced the original three Latin genders to two.
But you really need an expert.
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How about der Iran, die Schweitz and die Türkei?
You got me there 
Most of them then.
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