An FPM critique: The Gantt Chart and the hidden history behind your project timeline

It's one of the first tools most project managers learn about. Colourful bars stretching across a timeline, tasks lined up neatly, progress tracked against a plan. The Gantt chart feels logical, even neutral. Just a visual way to organise work. But like the RACI matrix, when we look more closely at where this tool comes from and what values it was built on, the picture becomes considerably more complicated.

What is the Gantt chart?

The Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart used to visualise a project's schedule. Each task is represented by a bar, with its length and position on the timeline indicating its start date, duration, and end date. It helps project managers plan, coordinate, and track work, and it remains one of the most widely used tools in project management today, baked into software from Microsoft Project to Asana to Monday.

The chart is named after Henry Gantt, an American engineer who developed it in the 1910s¹ . Gantt was a close follower of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the man behind "scientific management": the idea that human labour should be broken down into small pieces, measured, and optimised for maximum output. Most project management textbooks don't pay attention to that connection. We think they should.

The history we don't talk about

Henry Gantt grew up in a slaveholding family in Maryland And while this biographical fact is rarely mentioned in project management education, scholars have begun tracing how the logic underpinning tools like the Gantt chart connects to much older systems of organising and controlling labour, including plantation accounting practices² . These systems required the careful tracking of people, time, and output. In other words, scheduling and visualising labour wasn't invented by 20th century engineers. It was refined over generations of slavery and the racialised systems built to manage and control enslaved people.

In his research, historian Edward Jones-Imhotep³ has argued that the Gantt chart functioned as a mechanism of racial containment during the Great Migration, the period when hundreds of thousands of Black Americans moved from the rural South to seek work in Northern industrial cities. Rather than being a neutral planning tool, it was used in ways that linked whiteness with efficiency and productivity and was deployed to exclude Black workers from formal industrial employment. The chart didn't just track tasks. It tracked and reinforced who was considered capable, reliable, and worthy of inclusion.

So what does this mean for how we use it today?

We're not suggesting you immediately delete every Gantt chart from your project plans. But we do think it's worth sitting with some discomfort and asking some harder questions.

The Gantt chart, like scientific management more broadly, is built on a set of assumptions: that work can be neatly decomposed into tasks, that time is linear and predictable, that progress can be objectively measured, and that the role of management is to monitor and control that progress. These assumptions are not neutral. They tend to centre the perspective of the person doing the planning, not the people doing the work. They make invisible the relational, emotional, and contextual dimensions of project work: the check-in that took twice as long because a team member was struggling, the task that couldn't move forward because of a power dynamic that no bar chart could capture.

From a Feminist Project Management perspective, this is familiar territory. When a tool's core logic is rooted in surveillance, efficiency, and the separation of thinking from doing, it will struggle to hold the full complexity of collaborative, equity-centred work. A Gantt chart can tell you a task is "complete," but it cannot tell you whether the person who completed it felt supported, whether their workload was sustainable, or whether the outcome actually reflected the community's needs.

There is also the question of who gets to plan, and who simply executes. In many project environments, the Gantt chart is created by those at the top and handed down. The people doing the work fit themselves around it. That dynamic, which traces a direct line back to Taylor's separation of conception and execution, reproduces hierarchies rather than disrupting them.

Using the Gantt chart differently

If you work in contexts where Gantt charts are expected or required, you don't have to abandon them entirely. But you can use them more critically and more humanely.

You can co-create timelines with your whole team, rather than presenting a finished schedule for people to execute. You can build in explicit space for rest, reflection, and the unexpected, resisting the pressure to fill every bar right to the edge. You can ask regularly whether the plan still reflects reality, or whether reality has moved on and the chart is just fiction we're all pretending is true. And you can remain curious about what the chart is not showing you: the invisible labour, the relational work, the things that don't fit in a bar.

Most importantly, you can hold the tool lightly. Not as a neutral, objective representation of how work unfolds, but as just one perspective, shaped by a specific context and moment in time. The Gantt chart isn't just a timeline. It's a way of seeing work. And like any way of seeing, it was made by someone, somewhere, with particular assumptions baked in. We think it's worth knowing that.

What's your relationship with the Gantt chart? Have you found ways to use it more collaboratively or critically? We'd love to hear your reflections in the comments.

1  Gantt Chart (n.d.) History of the Gantt Chart. Available at: History of the Gantt Chart

2  Katie Laird, “Racist Spreadsheets: How Southern Plantations Shaped Modern Business Practices”, LinkedIn article. Available here.

3  Edward Jones-Imhotep, “Histories from Broken Worlds: Sentimental Machines and the Birth of a Notation”, talk, 2020. Available at: Histories from Broken Worlds talk