Google Tries To Explain Why It Quietly Removed Cultural Events Like Pride Month From Calendar
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- People online have noticed that Google Calendar is no longer displaying certain cultural events, such as Pride Month and Black History Month.
- With DEI in the spotlight, there are some accusations that the change has been made for political reasons.
- Google has dismissed this, saying that the decision was taken in mid-2024 for reasons of scalability and sustainability.
Google Calendar previously highlighted cultural events such as Pride Month and Black History Month. At some point, Google removed these diversity-related holidays from the calendar app, with some people now noticing and getting upset about the change. Google swears it’s not what they think.
As The Verge reported, other cultural events that no longer appear on the calendar include Indigenous People Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish Heritage, and Hispanic Heritage. This change was discovered the same week that Google Maps renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, in accordance with President Trump’s executive order.
Some members of the public posting on Google’s support pages believe that this isn’t a coincidence. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was one of several Big Tech leaders who attended Trump’s inauguration, and there have recently been conspicuous efforts in Silicon Valley to roll back on diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) measures, mirroring the approach of the new administration.
However, Google asserts that the calendar change is not related to the political landscape and that it has been in place for several months. Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld gave the following statement to The Verge:
“For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. 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.”
To our knowledge, there’s no clear evidence contradicting the company’s statement that this was an internal decision made months ago, so it would appear that no one noticed the removal of the events last year. Whenever the change was made, it is understandable that it might be subject to more scrutiny at this time of increased focus on DEI issues.
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