Google has stopped listing events like Black History Month and Pride Month on the calendar by default.
Additional events that have been excluded from the default calendar include Jewish Heritage Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month.
A Google representative, Madison Cushman Veld, confirmed these updates to TechCrunch, indicating that by mid-2024 the application will return to displaying only what timeanddate.com designates as public holidays or national observances.
“A few years ago, the Calendar team began the practice of manually incorporating a broader range of cultural events across many nations. We received feedback indicating that some events and regions were not included — and managing hundreds of moments consistently on a global scale proved challenging and unmanageable,” the spokesperson noted. They added that users still have the ability to “manually include other significant events” in their calendars.
This update to Google Calendar comes just one day after the company officially renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” for American users.
This decision aligns with an executive order from the Trump administration to alter the Gulf’s name.
It’s uncertain why these changes have recently gained attention among some users, but they arrive amid heightened scrutiny of rollbacks in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Major tech firms, including Meta, Google, and Amazon, have started reassessing or discontinuing various DEI programs, with the latter two adjusting their 10-K filings to downplay or omit all references to DEI.
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