Helen Berg

Berg studied at Wellesley College before completing a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1953. She moved to Corvallis in 1957 and began working as a statistician at Oregon State University in 1963,[2] initially as an operator of electromechanical calculators in the Agricultural Experiment Station. The work sparked her interest in statistics, and she began taking courses on the subject,[3] eventually completing a master's degree in statistics in 1973. She then spent two years as a researcher at the University of Illinois,[2] working half-time with the Department of Economics there and half-time in the Bureau of Economic and Business Research.[3] She returned to Corvallis in 1975,[2] and became the director of the Survey Research Center at Oregon State.[1] She continued to work as the center's director, also teaching statistics classes at the university,[3] until her retirement in 1993.[1][4]

Her research, published in many journal papers both as Helen M. Lowry and as Helen M. Berg, concerned feminist economics and "the statistical differences of social opportunity by gender".[2] One of her frequent collaborators, beginning with her work at the University of Illinois, was Marianne Ferber,[5] with whom she published well-cited work on factors affecting male versus female graduate student success,[6] and on gender pay gaps.[7]

Berg served on the Corvallis city council, representing Ward 7, for two consecutive terms from 1991 until 1994.[1][8] Her work as councillor included sponsoring a 1991 city ordinance against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.[9]

Berg was born in Columbus, Ohio, one of four children of mathematics professor Cyrus Colton MacDuffee and his wife Mary Augusta Bean;[2][12] her mother also had bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics.[3] She moved to multiple parts of the US as a child, eventually finishing high school in Madison, Wisconsin.[2] She was a Unitarian Universalist.[9]

She interrupted her undergraduate studies to marry Norman Ward in 1952;[2] he became an engineer for CH2M in Corvallis,[3] and they had a son and a daughter. In 1965, she married William P. Lowry,[2] a biometeorologist and climatologist then on the Oregon State faculty;[13] they filed for divorce in 1976.[14] In 1983, Berg married her third husband, Alan Berg. He was a forestry professor at Oregon State who had served on the Corvallis city council from 1973 to 1978 and served as mayor from 1979 to 1986; he died in 1989.[1]

In 1993, Berg donated to the local Audubon Society over 5 acres (2.0 ha) of land near Corvallis on which she had pastured horses. The land became the Hesthavn Nature Center, named by Berg from the Norwegian language word for a horse haven.[15][16][17]

Berg moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2007 soon after leaving office to be closer to her family.[1][2] In 2008, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill to name a post office after her, but it was tabled in the senate.[18] She died on August 13, 2010, in Portland, of the asbestos-related disease peritoneal mesothelioma at the age of 78.[1][2] In 2011, a plaza in Riverfront Commemorative Park in Corvallis was renamed the Helen M. Berg Plaza in her memory.[2][19] Her papers are kept in the special collections of the Oregon State University library.[4]