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As part of its ongoing roll back of diversity initiatives, Google has removed several inclusive holidays from its Calendar service. It says their inclusion was ‘not sustainable’ for its future.
Google Calendar has removed several key cultural holidays from it services on both desktop and mobile.
These include references to Black History Month, Women’s History Month and LGBTQ+ holidays, among others. The company has previously marked the occasion for all of these different initiatives but has swiped them clean for 2025.
Google says it switched to only showing default entries for public holidays and national observances last year. The Verge first reported the missing annual events last week.
In a statement to The Guardian, spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld claimed that the listed holidays were not ‘sustainable’ for Google’s model.
‘Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wider number of countries across the world,’ she said. ‘We got feedback that some events and countries were missing – maintaining hundreds of moments manually wasn’t scalable or sustainable.’
However, despite Google’s apparent reasoning, this change is in line with the company’s shift away from inclusivity. It recently announced it would be rolling back its previous commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in an effort to pander to Trump’s Administration.
Other tech giants including Meta and Amazon have followed suit.
Many users of Google Calendar have shown disappointment at the latest decision. Anyone hoping to keep tabs on these types of events must now do so manually. It also damages the exposure of these holidays to people who’ve not heard of them, ultimately shrinking the conversation and possibility for wider acceptance.
