Google Calendar does not include references to Black History Month after the company decided to stop observing cultural holidays.
The Washington Examiner reports that Google started phasing cultural holidays out of its online and mobile schedules at the end of last year.
The start of Black History Month will be on February 1, but other events such as Women’s History Month, Pride Month, and Indigenous Peoples Month are also no longer displayed.
Google’s Calendar team began adding cultural moments manually in many countries in the past. “We received feedback that other countries and events were missing – and maintaining hundreds and hundreds of moments manually globally was not scalable or sustainable.”
Google made several changes following the November election of Donald Trump, including abandoning its diversity-hiring goals. After Trump’s executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within the federal government was signed shortly after he took office, the tech giant changed its hiring and promotions practices.
Google announced last month that it would rename the Gulf of Mexico in its Maps application to “Gulf of America”, following Trump’s executive order.
The company also said it will follow Trump’s lead and start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the mountain in Alaska currently known as Mount Denali.
Google will “return to only showing public holidays and national celebrations globally from timeanddate.com while allowing the users to manually enter other important moments” by mid-2024.
Calendar users reportedly commented on the display changes on the user support websites and on social media. Conversely, the support site previously received comments from users who were not in favor of the company adding such observances to the calendar.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai attended the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th in Washington D.C.
