If you are referring to the bare-breasted African and Polynesian women occasionally seen on the cover and elsewhere from the 1890s until recently, a case could be made that the Geographic was dutifully responding to complaints by the magazine's growing number of feminist subscribers.
Unfortunately, a less visual but more politically motivated change occurred in the early 1980s which ended my subscription and I would guess many thousands of others.
It was when the National Geographic essentially signed on to the Naderites, the Earth Firsters and "the earth is getting over-populated and we need to do something about it" fear-mongers' causes. Instead of a magazine full of beautiful photos and quotable descriptions and interviews, we got oil spills, dried-up forests and other ugliness which could, by some creative editing, be attributed to Big Oil, Big Business or capitalist greed. And the proposed solution, invariably, would entail getting the government to do something about it, at great expense.
IMHO, both National Geographic and Scientific American became "woke" before that word was invented. Taken over by the lefties as the old-timers retired to greener pastures. Hey, there were even Admirals on the BoD of National Geographic in the old days.