Google’s online and mobile calendars no longer feature Women’s History Month, Black History Month and LGBTQ+ holidays among others. For years, the world’s biggest search engine used its popular online services to remind users about cultural events by marking them on its calendar app but in the last few weeks, users have noticed that it was no longer displaying those observances.
The tech giant is said to have removed the calendar observances last year due to apolitical reasons. According to a Google spokesperson, maintaining hundreds of moments manually each year for various countries “wasn’t scalable or sustainable”.
“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 statement said.
“So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.”
Google’s calendar app is reportedly used by more than 500 million people across the globe for work and personal reasons.
The decision to no longer acknowledge the important events follows a change in policymaking from the California-based company, especially in the backdrop of Donald Trump assuming the presidency. Ever since it was anticipated that the Republican leader would be returning to the White House, several tech giants, including Google, have flipped on their previously diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and queer-friendly policies.
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Google scraps DEI
In February, Google’s parent company, Alphabet announced it was scrapping its goal to hire more employees from underrepresented groups and reviewing some of its DEI initiatives.
Google, which sells cloud computing and other services to the US government, also said it was reviewing policy changes by Mr Trump aimed at curbing DEI in the government and among federal contractors.
“Because we are a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes to our programs required to comply with recent court decisions and US Executive Orders on this topic,” Fiona Cicconi, Alphabet’s chief people officer said in an email.
Google also revealed in late January that users in the US would see the name of the Gulf of Mexico changed to the “Gulf of America” after Mr Trump signed an executive order for the renaming.
