There are no laws for quotas in any country that force them on you. At most, there might be some lightweight directive that demand you try to fix extreme gender imbalances. Numerical quotas are not legalese. Companies define internally how they want to support gender and racial equality. Quotas also do not mean that you want everything to be 50/50 as a first milestone but try to infuse diversity in teams step by step. No company is going to force itself to continuously hire less qualified staff and harm their bottom line over a self imposed rule. Furthermore staffing is more complex than just how many years of experience one has. There are a lot of things that influence a decision. Even among 2 white male candidates, it is not necessarily that the one with the most work experience gets hired, sometime another candidate may have less experience overall but is fluent in a particular tech stack of interest, or maybe shows personality traits that make them more likeable and flexible in the eyes of their potential employer. As for your suggestion about hiring staff, bias affects men and women alike. Also even if you create a 50/50 hiring staff, male inherent bias and female learnt bias will still tilt the decision in a bad way. Bias needs decades to be unlearned.

In a perfect world we would not need quotas. We are far from a perfect world.

Quotas are not forced. Quotas do not require you hire someone subpar. Quotas are a requirement to hire the female applicant when equal skillset are presented by male and female alike, in case of male over-representation.

As for your solution to only force quotas in the hiring department, this is nonsense because the hiring team is, a team. Decisions are made jointly, seniority matters, or are you suggesting we completely exclude men from hiring teams? /s Bias does not affect only men, bias affects women as well. Our perception of every job and profession not traditionally inhabited by women is severely biased by history and experience. Also, to go back to the initial topic, a cabinet, well, the people in charge are the one doing the hiring and even in cabinets there is no quotas by law, so the people in charge are hiring the women. You perceive women going into powerful positions as non-meritocratic and done out of pity yet you most likely have no clue what their cvs are like.

And furthermore, this kind of rhetoric assumes that an all male force is by default normal and meritocratic. And all female force, or mostly female force has no meritocracy in it, that it must be forced for women do not have similar or better qualifications. And this is essentially misogynysm. Everything male is default, everything female is not normal.

This is not a discussion in good faith because you are knowingly twisting the meaning and purpose of quotas.

The purpose of quotas is to choose women between equally qualified candidates when there is a heavy bias towards men in a group of people. You may not like it, but it doesn't matter. That's the right thing to do because history has shown we cannot trust a fully male legislative body. And there are plenty of excellent women to fill those spots.

Also you cannot get fair representation without forcing it due to bias. This has been proven with experiments in the workplace, academia and even in blind analysis (aka when you don't know the gender of the applicant, that's because men and women build profiles and cvs differently and when men have to choose whom to hire, they tend to go for those profiles more similar to theirs - even though qualitatively there is essentially no difference).

We own half this planet, so we get half the say in organizing our society. That's it.

Not really. Plenty of societies were either egalitarian or downright matriarchal but with colonization and occupation from a select few, the culture changed. And that's not accounting for the abrahamic religions which spread with fundamentally misogynystic practices thus changing the societal balances for the last 2000 years.

You might think it is nature but in recent decades, with women getting into positions of power, it has been statistically proven that either companies, businesses and even governments and negotiations ran by women, are considerably more effective and economically fruitful than those run by men. We are weakened physically due to our reproductive features, and that's what the patriarchy exploited (and still does in some places today by erasing any form of reproductive health access) but that doesn't make a world ran exclusively by men the better alternative. And i'm not saying we need to run the entire world without men. Too much work when we already have to carry the weight of our civilization on our backs. Let's do this 50/50 where each pulls their weight.

This is an election, genius.

When the majority of a parliament is male nobody raises any questions or eyebrows. It is expected. It is normal. If it is a majority female then the entitlement rears up its ugly head. Such fragility.

Anyway, parliaments have no quotas you geniuses, they are voted in by people, cabinets can have quotas because they are unelected appointees by the government.

You misspelled patriarchy.