Quotas are not the same as saying "I have two candidates here who are basically the same level of qualifications so I'm going to hire the woman / black guy
well then I guess we have a genuine disagreement.
First of all, I do not presume that there are viewpoints that are inherent to races or genders or anything like that. I have a feeling I could find black white supremacists. Now there could be, I'm not claiming their isn't either, but off the top of my head I can't imagine what a "black viewpoint" would be without starting to feel a little /pol/ish. Generally I try to judge individuals by what they bring before me and not presuming that they are a stereotype. If there is something that my team lacks, I will look for people with that something, not for people with a skin color or genital concavity that I for some reason associate with that something. Maybe there is some natural affinity between <identity> and <valueable_personality_charictoristic>, if so then I will naturally end up with more persons of <identity> by hiring people with <valueable_personality_charictoristic>. In the case of a PR firm, yeah I could see 'understanding of demographic X' as being a valuable personality characteristic, and I could see how person from demographic X might have a high degree of correlation with that characteristic. In the case of an engineering firm, designing a new bridge for instance, I don't see a characteristic like that as being nearly as valuable, nor can I think of any other characteristic that might be linked to any identity.
Second this is not a dichotomy where you have to choose to hire more people belonging to an underrepresented class, or hire a monoculture consisting entirely of white heterosexual cisgendered rich property owning protestant men. You could also just not take race or gender or whatever into account at all. Generally speaking I would expect <identity> people to be hired at their proportion of application for a job when normalized for qualifications. If my assumption is wrong and there does exist some correlation between <identity> and ability then I would expect that to show up in the qualification normalization phase.
A quota is when you have a number or percentage of something that you try to get. You can certainly reduce the pool you try to apply your quota to to being only people with roughly equivalent qualifications, but that doesn't make it stop being a quota.
Your justifications for it are irrelevant.
also, do not presume motivations in others.
hmmm...
Prove that it is a mainstay of feminism and not some crackpot fringe member
ok, so anything I find will be dismissed with "no true feminist".
In fact you've basically just partially defined 'feminist' as one who does not call for a quota.
The fact that anyone would explicitly try to hire more X is basically inescapably linked to 'there is a quota for X'. They need to hire more means they haven't hired enough, meaning there is a quota. I am correct in assuming you are not going to tell me feminists would not call for employers the explicitly try to hire more women, right?
Ok, Off the top of my head though, there are related movements like CS1950 that while not primarily feminist (in the age of intersectionality the lines get blurry), they do explicitly give a number(percentage) of black people that they demand being hired. It's not feminist but it has the same underlying issues.
ah, but they are a some crackpot fringe member. Before I take any more effort than picking the worst quota offender off the top of my head and find one that is overtly feminist specifically, let me see if this is a true scotsman or not.
So this now degenerates to an argument about semantics, but at least now you can know what is meant when you hear people complaining about quotas.