Google’s calendar software no longer includes important cultural holidays like LGBTQ+ Pride Month and Black History Month.
For years, the tech giant’s mobile and web calendars have scheduled the two anniversaries for the first days of June and February, respectively. In 2025, both months are empty.
Also eliminated this year are any references to Holocaust Remembrance Day, Women’s History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month.
Currently, the time-management tool only displays default entries for national holidays and public holidays like Christmas Day.
Product specialists verified the removal of the change after users started reporting it to the Google Calendar Help Community board yesterday.
The decision to stop celebrating women’s, Black, and LGBTQ+ holidays was not warmly received by users.
Grace Spence, a user, stated,”I understand that posting here will do absolutely nothing but I need to express just how sick and absolutely disgusting this company is for removing these holidays
“History will never be on your side.”
According to a Google representative who talked to The Verge, the firm collaborated with the time-keeping website TimeAndDate.com to incorporate national holidays and public holidays into the Calendar program.
“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.
“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.”
Additionally, the company has stated that Google Doodles, which are redesigns of the company logo on the search engine’s home page that commemorate, will not be impacted by the changes to Google Calendar.