The other day I woke up very early and started reading a script. It was pretty good: thoughtful, political, about a newspaper after the Leveson inquiry. The female character I was reading for was an editor in her late thirties – let's call her Sophie – and she was described thus: "Sophie enters frame and walks towards us, she is surprisingly attractive for such a powerful woman."

Various other alarm bells started ringing throughout the household rather than the "casual sexism" one. I wonder how internalised this has become as I find myself needing to cut adrift from mainstream television, music and an incessant barrage of images which, however much I opt out, still find their way scrolling up the side of my computer screen.

I made breakfast and cajoled various small people into finishing homework so we could set off for school. As I pulled my bike into the kerb a bloke shouted out: "Milf!" My sons assumed he was appreciating a character I was playing in something – I don't really hear that stuff and who cares anyway? A woman near the drop-off nudged me and smiled conspiratorially: "Quite flattering: you don't expect that after a sweaty bike ride!"

Another instance of sexism being increasingly internalised, accepted? I don't know, but it feels normal.

I had a brief conversation at the school gate with a woman who worked in the media and has a couple of daughters and a son. She has chosen to be a stay-at-home mother and she's a great mother. We discussed the trials and tribulations of our sons' upcoming academic hurdles and I blithely sympathised with her that her daughters were yet to have to jump through the same hoops. She replied: "Oh, but it doesn't really matter so much for girls, it's the boys who need to get a good education."

I went into a newsagent on the way home and as I was buying a paper I was surrounded by the usual glut of magazines with images that I think I have become inured to most of the time. The customer next to me was holding the Sun open and some lovely boobs floated into my peripheral vision. I didn't feel particularly invaded but I did feel as if I was invading her privacy, so I quickly adjusted my eyeline onto another customer's paper which was on the business page. On the business page, selling bonds, there was a photo of a bikini-clad girl – not even a Bond girl!

I handed over my money. I was going to grab a Kinder egg from the box on the counter for my son after school but the new-style box offered a pink/blue alternative. Even chocolate has joined the ranks and is emitting the same nullifying message.

Neither sex should be predominantly portrayed in one way. There's nothing wrong with sexual images, nothing wrong with that at all, but it's the focus of those images on women rather than men and the passive portrayal of women in the images that seems so immensely unreflective of our real lives.

I started to wonder about the viability of an app for gender equality.

After my husband died [in 2008], my eight-year-old son was told by a couple of really good supportive male friends: "Look after your mum, you've got to be the man of the house now." It was the strangest thing to hear, for him and for me. Of course they were only being loving and supportive, but I think it shows how deeply embedded our sexism is. An eight-year-old boy was perhaps thought more capable of running things than his mother who had always worked and financially supported her family and run most of the household infrastructure too.

This is a systemic problem – it starts somewhere with little girls needing to be rescued by knights, incapable of being independent. In playgrounds and kids' parties I often hear: "Wow, look at her, she's a supermodel!" or "This is daddy's princess" or "You don't need to learn another language when you look like that!" Or, even more common: "You're gonna need to lock that one up when she becomes a teenager." I haven't heard much of "Wow, watch out you've got yourself a JK Rowling there; oops, here comes another Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Caitlin Moran, Paula Radcliffe, or Hilary Mantel!"

This casual sexism litters our conversation while the pornification of the female image now has such a strong place in our media it has become hard to create a space without it, where it doesn't intrude inside and outside our homes. This brand of sex sells papers, businesses, TV programmes and computer games. My half-brother is a games reviewer and I solicited his advice on guiding me towards some women who aren't just the damsels in distress. He told me: "Samus is my favourite female gaming character and has been an amazing symbol of equality in videogames. Until the latest game, which is loathed by the masses, because they present her character in a pretty sexist way." He added: "I think the most objectifying body proportions are in Soul Calibur, where the breasts are pretty much bigger than their heads."

Even children's clothes and toys aren't immune. Matalan and Primark had to withdraw padded bras and bikinis from sale that were being marketed to girls as young as seven. Tesco attempted to sell the Peekaboo pole dance kit in its toy department with the logo "Bring out your inner sex kitten". complete with a DVD showing "Sexy moves". Even good old gender-neutral Lego has joined these marketing ranks.

Our pop culture exemplifies this, of course. We all want to be like the people on the telly – and therein lies our responsibility.

I think back to when my mum was a rock journo in the late 70s/early 80s and all the women she interviewed and the pictures that were scattered around our house of Chrissie Hynde, Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox, Debbie Harry, Sinéad O'Connor, Joan Armatrading. I am sure they too were sold on their sex appeal, but look at how differently that was manifested alongside great voices and lyrics. They had a lot to vocalise, it seemed there was space for content as well as style in the mainstream market.

I don't think this portrayal or objectification of women is inevitable. I still think we can put that genie back in its bottle or Barbie doll or whatever the hell this strange new porny construct is – blow up the bloody bottle if we have to.

Since the microchip was invented half a century ago, we have built powerful computers, made them fit into our pockets, sequenced the human genome, bioengineered entire species, and 3D-printed kidneys – all with our new best friend Siri at our side.

How quickly we have embraced change, how quickly we have adapted and "appd" our lives because it's liberating for the most part. Fantastically so. We have reinvented the how of what we do in a way that was unimaginable even 20 or 30 years ago.

I thought about the dream of gender equality erupting around the same time as the internet was first conceived. No one was after sameness, just some equality. If we can sequence the genome, surely we can reinvent our gender roles using all these incredible resources to kick open another space where gender equality is achieved because, like technological advancement, it will benefit everyone. The media doesn't just transmit or report any more, it's the largest source of information. It educates us. I would go as far to say it creates our consciousness. It's society's most powerful instrument and its greatest preoccupation is sexualising young women, showing this one dimension again and again, out of proportion to all others – don't American teenagers spend 10 hours and 45 minutes a day consuming one form or other of media?

I guess the fact that one in 10 sites are pornography doesn't help much with the drive to remember women as something other than just a body. As Marie Wilson, a long-term advocate of increasing female representation in American government and business, says: "You can't be what you can't see."

I am an optimist, so I look at the progress made. It's fantastic that there are more female than male students studying journalism courses and a greater majority seem to win the academic prizes – even if they only hold 3% of the positions with clout once they are in the workforce.

There are more female medical students than male ones. Girls are having the confidence to outperform boys in a way they used to feel afraid to. Women are playing professional football and cricket. I remember well my four-year-old eyes hopelessly scanning for any other female when I hid alongside my dad at Old Trafford. The stadiums are flooded with girls and women today.

But my son still asks me in bewilderment: "Why is there a Woman's Hour, or that female film festival and special women's pages in newspapers? Why is it like women are some minority group – when, did you know mum, statistically they actually make up slightly more than half the world's population?"

"I don't know" is my answer. But my only punt is, because the gender role that is reflected back to them is too limiting, imagine not challenging it and wasting all that potential.

Is it possible to "hack" a home space, however we may define that in our single, coupled or "familied" households? Can we peel back assumptions, long-held beliefs, that old rat maze of domestic habits?

We have hacked so many other spaces in our lives – how we hook up, date, have babies, of same or different colour and raise them in same-sex relationships if we choose. We are getting used to new ways of how to "grow" ourselves, gestate, borrow wombs, buy eggs and yet in this space- gender expectation/objectification persists: the Chinese footbinding and the corsets have surely just been replaced with the full Brazilians and vajazzling.

Why hold either half of our potential as a society hostage in this way?

Why should men not garner respect for staying at home for those formative years? Why is nurturing not considered an achievement, if achievement is the benchmark of success/happiness? Can we reframe this? The few fathers I know who do the majority of parenting are fantastic parents – why is there an internal misandry from the rest of us around this, an embarrassment for the lone dude at the school gate? Either that or, when he pulls off a kid's birthday party he's a social miracle worthy of a headline.

So much work and business can now be done at home. Isn't that the point of the tech revolution? To liberate all of us. In the same way Jamie Oliver made cooking the new rock'n'roll, could he and a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or two turn the home space into something that means rock'n'roll for all of us?

Why aren't there men selling washing powder? I am so bored by women selling it. I want to see things turned upside down.

I don't understand the lack of innovation in these areas. If I were a journalist, I would ask every man I interviewed if he was worried about his hair loss, his weight, how he managed his work/home balance, what his neuroses were – and skip over the content of what he actually did. And I would by contrast ask all my female interviewees about their aspirations, their favourite music, the biggest influences and inspirations in their lives. I would – yes, I know I would be fired – but I would neglect to mention her physical appearance. Just until the tide turned a bit.

For now there's still this subliminal message that women are the objects and men are the subjects. We are only used to female nudity on our film and TV screens. Why isn't there male nudity to match – is only one sex worth ogling? I am sure there are plenty of women and men who would appreciate the change.

Remember Seth MacFarlane's boob song at the Oscars? Michael Fassbinder was nude in Shame the year before this – he received no such acknowledgement. Nor did John Malkovich or Harvey Keitel all those years before. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949: "Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female." It should be an outdated observation by now.

I want to share a thought from the pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead, who suggested in 1935: "If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognise the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place."

Maybe one day I'll wake up really early again and read a script that says "A woman with a sense of purpose walked into the room, people turned to listen as she spoke."

This is an edited extract of a speech given on 18 October at Wired 2013 in London; wiredevent.co.uk