Theory and practice
"where are smaller companies supposed to find individuals to meet their quotas? What are the actual targets? Are they set based on simple perpetual ratcheting or population at large ratios?"
Short answer, population at large ratio, and who knows where smaller businesses are supposed to find whoever. This practice is actually illegal, but the responsible enforcement agency does not enforce the rules as written. Long answer:
What is supposed to happen, the EEOC is (as far as I know) complaint-based, they don't regularly investigate companies or anything. If the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commssion) gets a complaint, they are supposed to make sure an employer is not discriminating in hiring, period (they aren't supposed to care what the gender or ethnic makeup of a company is). The only requirement is to be able to show that there is no discrimination in the job listing itself, no discrimination in where it's listed, and that the hiring practice itself is not discriminatory. Other than the obvious actual discrimination, the main ways to get in trouble are to, for example, list your ads only in Maxim (a men's magazine), then someone could complain that women would then have no chance to see the ad. Or, have someone show that they were not hired despite having better qualifications than the person who was hired. There's no requirement whatsoever that the population of a company has any particular makeup, just that everyone has an equal opportunity, in recognition of the fact that some jobs just don't draw everyone in equally. And in fact, if a company does hire fairly, they will not run into any problems.
That's the theory. In *PRACTICE*, some companies regularly have (illegal) race and gender-based set-asides, (illegally) will have things like Intel here where they will have higher bounties based on race or gender, and (illegally) sometimes even set different hiring requirements based on race and gender, to try to bring (insert race or gender here) up to the percentage of the population in the local area. This violates both the letter and spirit of the EEOC rules and laws, since clearly favoring one group over another violates equal employment opportunity. Of course, if a company is majority minority or women, there's no expectation that they should hire more men to match the local population. The responsible agencies look the other way, and view this as a proper way to ensure employment opportunty, instead of, you know, expecting companies to actually ensure equal employment opportunity.
" "White males did get organized. Unfortunately, those who did so were awful people and the current "men's rights" movement is filled with unrepentant assholes"
Yep, some are assholes, and the other problem has been the widespread racist view that every white male in the US can just do the secret handshake or whatever and get whatever great-paying job they want. So, if anyone even broaches this subject, someone will (racistly) complain about "entitled white males" and the discussion grinds to a dead halt. Don't get me wrong, as a white male I think these entitled white males *do* exist (wealthy, know "the right people" so they can kind of do what they want.) But the rest are in the same boat as everyone else. Of course just like any racist belief, one can see it's not true with their own eyes (why would there be any white males working at McDonals if they were all that entitled?) but facts don't get in the way of people believing it