In 2013, the California state senator Hannah-Beth Jackson made a certain amount of feminist history when she authored – and the legislature enacted – a first-in-the-nation resolution urging the state’s publicly held companies to appoint more women to their boards of directors.

The resolution endorsed research finding that companies with women on their boards perform better than those without, and encouraged corporations to add at least one and as many as three women to their boardrooms.

Five years later, Jackson is blunt in her assessment of the achievement.

“It was just sort of a thud,” she said. “We had virtually no success in getting any kind of positive response ... I realized that we were going to have to do more than ask politely.”

Jackson is now hoping to see California become the first state to mandate that corporations have at least one woman on their boards by the end of 2019. By 2021, under her bill, boards with five members would be required to have at least two women, and boards with six or more members would be required to have at least three. Those companies that failed to comply would be fined an amount equal to the average compensation for a board member.

“There’s a dam in the way of progress and opportunity, and that dam is the boardroom,” Jackson said. “We feel that corporate culture starts at the top, and if women are left out of corporate boards, we lose their expertise and leadership.”

The bill has passed the California state senate and is now under consideration by the assembly. Among the companies that could be immediately affected by the changes are Skechers and Tivo, which currently have all-male boards. Facebook, Apple and Tesla would need to add at least one female board member each by 2021; Google and Uber are already compliant, with three women on their boards each.

But while Jackson is optimistic that her bill will be passed by the legislature, the measure has touched off debate over an issue that is all but a dirty word in American politics: quotas. Corporate board gender quotas may have been effectively enacted by a number of European nations, but in the US, quotas are widely derided as anathema to the principle of “meritocracy”.

The California Chamber of Commerce and a host of business groups have come out in opposition to the measure, arguing that the bill “likely violates the United States Constitution, California Constitution, and California’s Civil Rights Act” by forcing companies to discriminate against men. Jon Healey, deputy editorial page editor for the Los Angeles Times, called the proposal “social engineering at its worst” and said that Jackson “doesn’t seem to understand that selling shares of stock is just a way to finance a company, not to create a host of public-interest obligations”. Susan Fowler, a software engineer and advocate for women in technology, tweeted concern that the bill would result in the “tokenism of women”.

But for some advocates, the time has come to stop waiting for things to change on their own.

“If boards were going to achieve gender parity, they would have done it by now, and the fact that they haven’t could mean that it’s time to try something else,” said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, a founding member of the tech diversity initiative Project Include. “We know that internally driven [diversity and inclusion] initiatives have a lower rate of success. Usually it takes some external pressure, like compliance with a law, to make it work.”

Tracy A Thomas, a constitutional law professor at the University of Akron, has argued that the US should reconsider – and embrace – gender quotas.

Thomas traces the American aversion to quotas to the conservative backlash to the civil rights movement, which saw the government attempting to remedy systematic discrimination through affirmative action. And though the ability to enact race-based affirmative action has beens limited by the courts, Thomas argues that there is a constitutional path to mandating gender quotas as a remedy to discrimination – and that placing more women in positions of power is necessary to ensure that social progress is not erased amid a subsequent backlash.

“You have to go straight to the power structures, and quotas do that easily and beautifully,” Thomas said. “#MeToo showed that we could change ideas, but what’s really different after #MeToo? Yeah, we feel better about it, we can read about it, but when an individual goes to court, the law is still the same.”

If anything, Hutchinson added, the measure might be too conservative.

“It’s a maximum of three women on a board,” she said. “What’s the big deal?”