Atlantic Business Magazine's women's issue gets a negative earful

A special issue of Atlantic Business Magazine highlighting women in business has provoked a surprising number of negative response. Dawn Chafe, the executive editor said she was shocked to receive the online comments. 

"People coming online and telling us that we needed to build a wall around businesswomen, that a lot of Canadian men are out of work because there's too many women in the workforce," she told the CBC in an interview from St. John's, N.L. "And that was some of the more polite comments."

There are more than 40 women featured on the January-February cover including designer Lisa Drader-Murphy, former federal NDP leader Alexa McDonough and Emera Energy CEO Judy Steele.

"Frankly, if you had asked me a year ago did I think we even need this kind of issue, I would have said, 'No, hardly, not in Canada and not in Atlantic Canada. We're far too smart. We're far too advanced for anything like that,'" she said.

Now Chafe said she sees this cover as an apology to businesswomen who have been overlooked and she said the magazine will push to have more women in the magazine in future issues as well. 

"I guess after 28 years of producing magazines that have been almost exclusively about men in business, we finally woke up and realized we really needed to pay tribute to the amazing and intelligent and talented businesswomen that are out there in Atlantic Canada," she said.