I mean, very often corporations (at least the tech companies I've worked for) have a float/group/whatever marching in a pride parade because their employees want them to. Just about every company I've worked for has something in the Seattle pride parade and it's not just because of the marketing department. It's always filled with employees who volunteered to participate because they care about that sort of thing. Moreover, the reason it exists is because of those same employees. When a company didn't participate, they started because their employees start vocally asking about it at all hands meetings, or other company-public forums, raising awareness in the company and causing a relatively liberal employee base to be disgruntled, blog about it, etc. It's an easy way to keep employees happy by signaling values.

Is that a bad thing? Not really. Of course the risk is considered by the company, and they're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, they're weighing a bunch of things. Potential customers lost, potential customers gained, potential employees (and hence productivity lost), potential hiring disadvantages, etc. Still, it's most definitely a good thing that employees put this pressure on and that companies do this sort of thing, because there is a hell of a lot more nuance and strategy to social change than just people who actually care about an issue signalling about it.

Like I said, the pressure to do this comes from regular people at the company, not just the marketing department (or regular people in the marketing department). This often puts a company in a place (at least in a competitive hiring market like software) where they need to make a decision and word spreads and they lose out on hiring advantage because of it. For example, I know a ton of people who turned down jobs and even more who wouldn't apply at all at Uber because of the Fowler blog.