Google’s online and mobile calendars no longer contain references to Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and LGBTQ+ Holidays.
The world’s largest search engine previously marked the beginning of Black History Month in February and Pride Month in June, but the event will not appear in 2025.
Holiday removal was first reported by Verge last week.
Google spokesman Madison Cushman Veld has provided the Guardian with a statement saying the listed holidays were not “sustainable” for the model.
“A few years ago, the calendar team began manually adding broader cultural moments in many countries around the world. There was feedback that several other events and countries were missing, and there was a number of other events and countries. Maintaining hundred moments consistently and globally manually was not scalable or sustainable,” the statement said.
“So in mid-2024 we went back to showing only public holidays and national compliance from Timeanddate.com worldwide, allowing users to manually add other important moments. ”
The decision to stop black, LGBTQ+ and women’s holidays is another move on the growing list of changes Google has made following the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
Tech Behemoth recently announced a previous commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in employment policy following the US President’s order to curb federal agencies’ DEI in one of his first moves as president. We have announced that we will be rolling back.
Google also revealed in late January that US users had changed their name to “American Gulf,” and that the company would now begin using the name “Mount McKinley” in Alaska mountains . The executive order from Trump was signed on his first day in office. The company enacted a change in the Gulf name for US users on Monday.
Many users on social media have expressed disappointment and frustration at Google’s latest decision. Following the changes, users who want to track events such as Pride Month, Black History Month, and Indigenous Month will need to manually add them to their calendar.
It is not clear whether these changes will affect Google Doodles. This usually celebrates these events with digital artwork on the website’s homepage. Google didn’t directly address the state of Doodles when asked by the Guardian, but said, “Google continues to actively celebrate and promote cultural moments as a company of our products.” I did.
