Furthermore, I have never seen any american interviewer not interrupting their subjects.
This is my bias, so I never see sexism nor racism in this context. I only see idiots who think more of themselves than they should.
In this particular case and in regards to sexism, however, the voice that should be listened to most, in my opinion, is the voice of the subject. If we don't consider her voice the most important voice we put her in the subaltern and that is the worst position you can have. The subaltern being women in the context of patriarchal history.
The person who said 'Let her speak please.', should also be heard, regardless of her motives. The interviewers should shut up and let their subjects speak at all times, so we need more of this social courage.
I would find it very odd to save a string of questions until the end.
It's much more fun to engage in the conversation actively.
I'm not saying control the conversation. Good conversationalists listen more than they speak.
But having fun in a conversation is engaging in it. Not replying paragraph after paragraph, in my opinion.
In the context of interviewer<-->interviewee, though, I think it is generally more interesting to listen to the interviewee than the interviewer. It seems to me that the whole premise of the interviewer<-->interviewee is for the interviewer to get the interviewee to talk.
An interviewer’s job is to let the interviewee speak to the audience, even though the audience doesn’t get to directly ask questions.
In general nobody cares what the interviewer thinks, and we don’t want to hear them blab about themselves.
(This makes many “podcasts” unlistenable.)
If you want to get the most out of those conversations, you need to meet the other person halfway: be more assertive about your time to speak, while also letting them know that they’re trampling you and need to back off a bit. If you don’t tell them they’ll just think you’re a shy person with nothing to say.
Other cultural differences cause similar problems. If someone I don’t know is mad at me and just silently stews with a vaguely grumpy neutral expression on their face, I’m not going to have any idea they’re mad, because in my culture we just come out and tell people what we’re thinking. By contrast I know people who are deeply humiliated by (what seems to me like) light criticism, because it is huge faux pas and therefore never happened in their culture. Similarly, I know people who simply don’t understand the concept of teasing, at all, and others who are almost cruelly biting in their teasing: when those two collide it’s not pretty.
Or if I’m listening while someone tells one thing to one person, and something contradictory to someone else, I will consider them to be dishonest/untrustworthy and start discounting everything they say. But in some cultures, it’s normal and expected to say what you think the listener wants to hear, and listeners just have to learn to read between the lines and interpret subtle distinctions in presentation style.
Etc.
Good conversationalists will match each other's way of speaking and come to some common ground. It usually happens really quickly.
So you'll know when someone is done, or you'll be able to interject ideas into what they're saying.
It isn't rude, in my opinion, to interrupt someone in this way.
"So, I saw the craziest thing the other day when I was driving by the coffee shop..." "The one on main?" "Yes, that one!"
Etc...
It's called a conversation. It'd be really weird to save your questions until the end in a setting like that.
That said, let people speak. Listening is more important than talking.
I find myself interrupting my children a lot more than I like (and while it often feels like it's because they're interrupting me as well, I'm certain that's usually not true). Having a stuffed animal or similar "conch" talisman might help us actually listen, because each of us could point out who has the conch.
That is, I will pause while speaking, spooling my next thought out to the phonological loop, to review and filter it, before streaming it out through the voice apparatus, but then some jackass will use that break to assume conversational priority when I haven't yielded it yet. So when I resume speaking, they are already talking.
It is practically impossible for me to engage in a conversation with such a person constantly ruining it for me, so I usually just keep my thoughts to myself and regret even showing up for the party.
Even my spouse does this in a 1-on-1 conversation. And then I am the one accused of interrupting, as though it is acceptable to jump in between two sentences of a paragraph. It's like I need that stupid conch shell from Lord of the Flies in order to say everything that I want to say. And I get so irritated when people spew out a stream of content-free babble, for the sole purpose of maintaining priority, to the point where I forget what I have been wanting to say for the last 5 minutes.
It might be a sexist thing, but I think it's more likely that the people with the least latency between brain and larynx--and therefore the fewest speech filters--are the ones that never learned that conversational priority isn't just about refraining from talking while sound is still coming out of someone else's mouth. And, of course, there are also the people who simply decide they are the most important person in a conversation and act like they're the lead actor giving a monologue, and everyone else is the chorus.
So please, have a care as to whether a silence in the conversation is a pause or a yield. You may be interrupting someone giving due consideration to what they will say next.