Google Calendar removes Pride Month, Black History Month and Women’s History Month
Google Calendar has removed dates for Black History Month, Pride Month and Women’s History Month. (Illustration by Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Google Calendar has removed dates for Black History Month, Pride Month and Women’s History Month.
The company deleted the February, March and June dates from its calendar in what a spokesperson said was a long overdue change.
The spokesperson told PinkNews: “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.”
The tech giant axed its goals to recruit staff from minority groups, and has joined the likes of Amazon and Meta in ending diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies. The changes come as president Donald Trump bids to “end the onslaught of useless and overpaid DEI activists”.
After Trump ordered the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America, Google Maps changed the name – although this will only be seen in the US, the BBC reported.
Big-name brands, such as Walmart, Ford, Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson and Jack Daniel’s had already scrapped DEI programmes, in the face of a campaign led by right-wing pundit Robby Starbuck.
McDonald’s also announced that they were following suit. However, Apple’s board of directors is swimming against the tide and has asked shareholders to vote against a proposal to end equality initiatives.
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