Feminism and Political Empowerment?

Yes, it would most definitely undermine democracy.

Such a system would work if there were a quota within political parties over how many men and women should be put forward as nominees, but they absolutely could not alter the people actually elected. It would be a disaster of democracy if a person was elected by denied a seat because there weren't enough of a particular social group.

But then as I see it quotas are inherently sexist anyway. Anywhere a gender quota is enforced makes it really clear that gender is an issue for consideration. Bu which I mean a company for example which has a quota on female employees will hire females to fill the quota. Those women will then ALWAYS have it over their heads that they were not better qualified or experienced than male applicants. They may well have been, but they'll never know, because they were hired under a quota. The fact that they were women was a major part of why they were hired, not their individual skills.

In the USA elected women are never above 20% so there is huge bias there already whether one wants to acknowledge it or not. There are two ways of going about dealing with this:

1. Raise awareness and study the situation to find the issues that discriminate against women and fix them.

2. Or if that doesn't work - quotas.

I prefer the first. Quotas should always be a last ditch effort. But frankly you cannot pretend that the status quo is really democratic if men always have 80% of the seats.

Would feminism also call for legislation to force a quota on the number of women that must hold political offices?

If it would, then it would have already.

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