Google cuts Black History, Pride, other identity months from calendar

The Google Calendar will no longer mark the start of identity-based months like Pride Month, Black History Month, and Women’s History Month. The company cited scalability as well as sustainability concerns with having too many holidays. 

Previously, the company, headed by CEO Sundar Pichai, marked the beginning of Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, and others. Although Black History Month was marked for 2024, there is no such marking for 2025, per the Guardian.

Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld explained, “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,” Veld added.

This move is part of a broader trend at Google following the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. The company also recently rolled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) Initiatives. Although the orders were for the federal government, many companies have been rolling back their DEI programs. Companies taking similar steps have included Meta, Amazon, Walmart, Disney, and many others.

Public organizations, such as PBS, have also cut DEI programs. Additionally, Google announced the name change of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” as Trump wrote in an executive order during his first weeks in office.

A company spokesperson mentioned that Google “continues to actively celebrate and promote cultural moments as a company in our products,” such as YouTube Music’s Black History Month playlist.