Google confirmed on February 11, 2025, that its Calendar service was no longer automatically listing several cultural observances, including the start of Black History Month, Pride Month and Women’s History Month. The events did not appear in the 2025 calendar, prompting criticism from users who had previously seen them included by default.
The change had been made in mid-2024, according to company spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld. Google said its Calendar team had manually added a wider collection of cultural moments in many countries, but received complaints that other countries and events were missing. Maintaining hundreds of entries consistently around the world was not scalable or sustainable, the company said.
Google therefore returned to displaying public holidays and national observances obtained globally from timeanddate.com. Users could still create or import their own entries for events not included in the default set. The decision shifted responsibility for tracking observances such as Pride Month, Black History Month and Indigenous Peoples’ Month from the service’s central calendar to individual users.
The company said the Calendar change would not determine future Google Doodles, the artwork used on its search homepage to recognise people, anniversaries and cultural occasions. It also pointed to other products, including a Black History Month playlist on YouTube Music, as examples of continued promotion of cultural moments. Removing the calendar entries was therefore a product-policy change rather than a company-wide end to every related feature.
Timing nevertheless placed the decision amid broader scrutiny of Google’s approach to diversity and politically contested place names. The company later rolled back diversity, equity and inclusion commitments in employment policy after President Donald Trump began his second term. It also changed map labels for US users to Gulf of America and Mount McKinley following presidential orders. Google said the Calendar policy predated those later actions.
That chronology matters because the evidence does not establish that the calendar entries were removed in response to the 2025 administration. Google’s explanation focused on the difficulty of choosing and maintaining an internationally complete list. Critics instead saw the absence of prominent Black, LGBTQ+ and women’s observances as a meaningful loss in a widely used product.
As of the February 11 confirmation, the default feed was narrower but users retained manual control. The dispute concerned which events a global platform should surface automatically, how it could do so consistently across countries and whether operational limits adequately explained the removal of culturally significant dates.
