I am glad our mockery about you being gone for x weeks after 20 Jan caused you to be back so quickly after your dreams dashed.
It is pretty much first time I agree with ChrisBFRPKY, at least as he wrote. I consider quotas, gender parity, etc as feel-good measures that won't actually do anything except fulfilling ideological wankery of left.
Actual problem is equality (or rather lack of it) of opportunity, lack of social mobility, increasing wealth inequality etc. Gender/race/whatever quotas are, at best, small pink bandaid on gaping wound.
Most jobs (And especially elected political positions) involve a lot of qualities for qualification that are incommensurate.
To say "who is the most qualified" past a certain point, tends to involve a fair amount of subjective calls.
Let's imagine we had no active racism in the world. No one hates or judges based on the color of skin, people are trying to be chill and objective, but otherwise the world looks like it does right now.
I think we still have a problem because even absent active racial animosity, people tend to gravitate to hire people who feel familiar, who share a speaking style, a dress style, a cultural background. When you get into the subjective realm, as all hiring does, those gut feelings even with a best effort to be objective, are going tofall along race lines to some extent. Who feels likely to "fit in" in the office culture? Someone from the same culture.
People also get jobs because of people they know. People their family knows, people they met through school growing up or through college, people who lived in their neighborhood.
But our neighborhoods tend to break around race lines. So do our schools. And of course families, duh.
And there are racial disparities with who is in a hiring position. We don't need to analyze how we got here or argue about how it came to be to recognize that there are disparities along race lines of who runs companies, who is in a hiring position in lucrative careers, and yes, who is in political office.
The point is that even without any active racism, the system is set up in such a way that a sincere attempt at meritocracy and "ignoring race" would still inevitably favor people of the same race as the people already holding power and influence to a greater degree. That's why I don't have too much of a problem with recognizing race among the many incommensurate qualities. Failing to do so is a compounding disadvantage for peope who have been historically marginalized.