We had a DEI workshop at a previous workplace. The presenter suggested that {minority group members} typically don't feel comfortable speaking up in meetings, s

We had a DEI workshop at a previous workplace. The presenter suggested that {minority group members} typically don't feel comfortable speaking up in meetings, so I kept track of how many times each person spoke and got interrupted. Then halfway through, I proposed an experiment -- for the rest of the meeting, we leave a full second, by the clock, between when one person finishes talking and the next person starts. The presenter thought that would be interesting so we tried it. I tracked which people spoke after that (and how many times the rule was violated). If you ever try this experiment, be aware that maintaining a 1 second silence is very uncomfortable. The results were pretty unexpected, but perhaps the most surprising thing (although it shouldn't have been surprising in retrospect) was that the group that benefitted the most in this experiment -- most underrepresented in the meeting before, and proportionately represented after -- was a minority group whose existence wasn't even mentioned once in the entire DEI presentation. Can you guess who it was? That's right: English-as-a-second-language immigrant employees, who were fluent but needed an extra ~0.25s more than the native English speakers to compose their thoughts. Coincidentally this group was mostly composed of {members of groups classified as majority by more common axes of classification}, who unlike other {members of their group}, almost never had their voices heard in meetings because they were ESL.