Image above: Earlier incarnation of Apple’s Calendar still featured Women’s History Month.
International Women’s Day is March 8, but you wouldn’t’ know it from Apple’s Calendar app in the U.S., or several other countries.
Apple appears to have removed the holiday, along with Women’s History Month, from the app in the U.S. as well as some other countries. The move has not gone over well online.
On Meta’s Threads, Dr. Jolene Brighten, host of the women’s heath podcast, “The Dr. Brighten Show,” drew attention to the removal, asking Apple “why did you take International Women’s Day off the calendar?” in a post yesterday tagging the brand. The post received around 1,900 likes since yesterday, as well as 169 reshares and 70 comments.
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Some replied about the status of the event on the calendar app in their country, with users in Canada and Italy stating it has also been removed, while those in Mexico, Germany, Sweden, and Norway report it is still listed there.
“The significance of International Women’s Day 2025 cannot be overstated,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement published online today. “It is no longer a case of addressing unfinished business on the gender justice front, but one of bracing ourselves to resist active regression and a mounting assault on our rights.”
Google faced backlash online last month over its removal of cultural events, including Black History Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day, from its own calendar app, with the company stating, “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.”
Apple’s changes seem to stem at least as far back as when Google faced such criticism. A commenter on the Reddit page r/applehelp” posted around a month ago that they were “Missing Black History Month in the Calendar app,” with another commenter noting, “women’s history month and international women’s day are also gone.”
Despite this, Apple seemed to avoid the same type of widespread criticism that Google faced at the time.
The timing of the potential brand reputational damage for Apple is far from ideal, as it just yesterday announced the launch of its new MacBook Air laptop, available March 12.
Story updated:According to Apple, there was no change to the Calendar in the U.S. to delete the holidays, which the company claims were not previously featured on the app in this country.
