Photograph: Meredith Parmelee/Getty - taken from the Technology Guardian

It’s not just me, is it? That picture - it is absolutely hideous, right? I actually like the colour pink, and I find it offensive on the eyeballs. It’s actually quite difficult to look at, even before the red haze of rage covers my vision because yes, that hand, with its horribly over-manicured nails, is clearly meant to belong to a woman who is using a hot pink keyboard that appears to have no functional keys whatsoever except a shopping button. I barely know where to start, or how to structure a rant about it.

I know what you’re thinking, though. “So what? Why don’t you just ignore it?” Well, if it had just turned up on a stock photograph website, I would. I’d just scroll straight past. But it was used this week by the Guardian to illustrate a story on its website entitled How secure are your online passwords?

Now, in fairness, the article does talk quite a bit about shopping online. But it’s also, more generally, about how to create and remember a good, uncrackable password that can’t be guessed by random visitors to your MySpace page. It’s a really good article, actually, and it doesn’t seem to be aimed at readers of either gender, particularly - it’s just about encouraging the average Internet user to be more careful with their security online. Considering the Government is busy flinging all of our personal details to the wind, it’s quite important that we’re not leaving ourselves wide open here. But that picture is just so offputting that I almost clicked away from the page as soon as it loaded. It’s hideous, and it’s also completely unsuited to the article. The only link that I can see, the only reason I can find for including that picture with that article, is that the article was written by a woman.

(Presumably, she has a better keyboard than the one in the photo, or she wouldn’t have got very far with her article.)

Maybe it shouldn’t matter, and maybe I shouldn’t care, but quite frankly, I’m feeling pretty offended right now. I’m sure writing angry letters to newspapers is one of the universally recognised signals of getting old and past it (so I sent the Guardian an e-mail instead) but seriously, this is the Guardian we’re talking about. It’s supposed to be one of the more respectable UK newspapers - liberal, progressive, arty, and all that. It’s not the kind of paper you’d expect to be busy propagating sexism. And, okay, it’s only one picture, but the kind of thing is insidious. Sexism is widespread - you only have to cast an eye over the adverts on Tube platforms, or in the paper, or on television, to realise that we’re not living in a state of gender equality. Particularly when you’re talking about the IT industry: the Guardian itself has run stories this year about how women working in IT are paid less than their male counterparts, and that there are far fewer of them to begin with.

Maybe one picture accompanying one article isn’t going to set feminism back by several decades, but it really doesn’t help matters. The idea that women are all pink-loving girlies who do nothing more strenuous or challenging online than buying themselves something pretty (of course, they couldn’t do much more without breaking their nails) is not one that I’d be happy to see propagated anywhere. Let alone in the Guardian.