As far as I am aware, the Windsor model is unique among Canadian universities (2). It promotes equity procedures both from the top down and the bottom up. At the top is a presidential commission on employment equity which reviews every hiring process. At least two of its members are senior women faculty and one is a faculty member from one of the other designated groups (visible minority, Aboriginal, persons with a disability). It is chaired by the vice-president, academic. This commission must give its approval before any hiring can be completed. It has the power to turn the process back at any point. It can ask that an initial advertisement be redone, that a short list be revised, that more candidates be interviewed, if it appears that the letter or spirit of the equity process has not been observed.

At the bottom working upward are the equity assessors-faculty members who have been approved for the task by both the president of the university and the president of the faculty association. Equity assessors must be present at every meeting of committees which hire faculty and administrators or who consider faculty members for renewal, promotion and tenure. Their role is one of non-voting observer/participant whose job it is to ensure that all the equity procedures set out in the bylaws of the Senate are followed.

Administration pimping is the grown-up version of student plagiarism.

In addition to the equity assessor, these committee must have at least one woman voting member. Given that women comprise only about 20% of all full-time faculty, not all of whom would necessarily be eligible to serve on these committees, the committee burden for women faculty can be quite onerous. Many women faculty serve as "the woman" committee member in their own department and as the equity assessor on committees in other departments. The Windsor equity plan is very labour-intensive, but its strength has been in the fact that processes are monitored from the very beginning and can be halted or redirected at any point, up to and including when a single candidate's name is proposed for a position. By way of contrast, the equity plan at York University leaves the equity review to the end when it is very difficult to stop a hiring process, no matter how many procedural or equity-related problems might exist.

In its initial three or four years, the University of Windsor equity plan was arguably the most effective in Canada. It represented the first truly productive effort to increase the percentage of women faculty and administrators. When the plan was inaugurated in 1988, the university had one of the worst equity hiring records among all Canadian universities with respect to women.