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ORVALLIS - Oregon State University will honor three women with the 2001 Women of Achievement Awards at two-hour reception at the campus Women's Center on April 27.

The reception begins at 3:30 p.m. and will include entertainment by the Corvallis-based women's close harmony quartet, Four-in-Hand. An open house to celebrate the remodeling of the Women's Center precedes the reception and begins at noon. Both events are free and open to the public.

The awards, presented by the Women's Center, are based on devotion to equality and furthering the status of women, and for excellence in work not widely recognized, yet with potential for creating change.

The 2001 recipients include Flaxen Conway, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Karel Murphy.

Conway was cited for her assistance to the community that extends from local efforts to international service. She is director of the OSU Sea Grant Fishing Families Project, a community outreach specialist with OSU's Department of Sociology and an OSU Extension Service faculty member. In Conway's 11 years of service she has been a mentor to women graduate and undergraduate students who find themselves in the historically male field of natural resources. Her award cites her commitment to furthering the status of women, which is demonstrated by her work with the Fishing Families Project. Her work includes skilled leadership, communication, facilitation, and organizational efforts to mentor and unite fisherman's wives in a time of economic transition.

Gonzales-Berry has served as the chair of the OSU Department of Ethnic Studies since 1997 and has worked to achieve diversity, not just in staffing, but in curriculum.

Gonzales-Berry has worked to highlight the understanding of concerns of gender to those of race and class. She has also modeled the crucial role that can be played in university society by a woman of color dedicated to social change. She has published widely on Chicana/o literature including an anthology on Mexicana writers and several essays and chapters on the work of Latina/Chicana literary figures.

Murphy, executive assistant to the dean of the OSU College of Engineering, was the first management service employee to serve as chair of the OSU President's Commission on the Status of Women. She is the most long-standing member of the commission, devoting 10 years to the commission.

She was cited for bringing to the forefront the environment for women office workers in an effort to elevate the status of women at OSU.