Google says it removed cultural events from its calender last year

Google has removed events such as Black History Month and Pride Month from being listed on the calendar by default. 

Other events that were removed from the default calendar include Jewish Heritage, Indigenous People Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month. 

Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld confirmed the changes to TechCrunch, saying that in mid-2024, the app reverted to show only what timeanddate.com shows as a public holiday or and national observance. 

“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world. We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing —  and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” the spokesperson said, adding that users can still “manually add other important moments,” to their calendars. 

Google’s calendar update news also comes just a day after the company officially changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” for users in the U.S. 

The move was in accordance with the Trump administration’s executive order to change the name of the Gulf. 

It is unclear why these changes are just being noticed now by some users but it comes as the roll-back on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts has taken the spotlight. Big Tech companies have started to end various DEI measures. Meta, Google, and Amazon have all announced a reassessment or elimination of DEI programs, with the latter two adjusting the wording in their 10-K filings to remove some or all mention of DEI.