What is wrong with a white woman wearing a headset? I believe this says more about you than it says about a company that just grabs a random image of a woman with a headset.
What's wrong with it, when it's clip art, is that it's contrived and overly specific in an oddly sexist way. Even worse, it's not explicit in its sexism, but it appears as a statistical pattern -- that is, the gender distribution is not 50/50 but more like 10/90; and the headset-versus-phone distribution is similarly out-of-touch with reality, at least at those offices without a dedicated customer support team; and minorities and Asians are almost completely absent because you might think of that bad word "Outsourcing".
The problem is not with whiteness, womanness, headsetness, or clipartness, but the intersection's ubiquity in the face of its unlikelihood. It appears everywhere and the problem is precisely "I just saw that on ten other sites, and I'm willing to bet that this is nothing like the person I'd actually be talking to if I called them up." If you just gave me real people working at your company, rather than clip art, that would already be a great start.
But, as I said, I agree. Yes, it says a lot about me that I see such a pattern, interpret it as "someone's trying to manipulate my subconscious" -- even if that wasn't their intent, it somehow hits me that way -- and then refuse to do business with people who I interpret as manipulative bastards. It also says a lot about me that I can't escape that feeling even after I have cogitated it.
But I still feel justified, because the companies who grab random images because they haphazardly think "this is what my customer wants to see" are not the sorts that I want to subsidize. I would rather have a company that's so lazy that they don't look for clipart at all, than a company that sets out to find clipart and then gets lazy somewhere midway along and, as you say, "just grabs a random image of a woman with a headset." Laziness is good, but if you're not going to be lazy, be special.
