Google‘s online calendar will no longer track Pride Month, Black History Month, or Women’s History month shortly after the company also abandoned its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
The changes, which were first reported last week by The Verge, also include National Native American Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Jewish Heritage Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A Google spokesperson told The Advocate:
For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. 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,” they continued.
Google announced two weeks ago that it would be purging its DEI initiatives, including its efforts to hire more employees from underrepresented backgrounds, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Google also changed its diversity website in week prior, NBC reported, including by renaming an executive’s position from “Chief Diversity Officer” to “VP, People Operations.”
Google Maps now also labels the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” The company said in a statement on Twitter/X that its names come from the Geographic Names Information System, which is under the United States Geological Survey, an office of the federal government, and that they updated it to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order mandating the change.
“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” the company wrote.
We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.
The gulf is still known as the Gulf of Mexico to users in Mexico, and to the rest of the world it is “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).” Google Maps’ popular competitor, Apple Maps, has yet to do the same.
This article has been updated to include comment from Google.