In most ways he took it entirely for granted. It was a weak point of King's liberalism that it rested upon wealth accumulated for the benefit of men alone, and he would have not been the person to question it.

In conversation with Robin, who took a progressive line on the question of equal pay (the only issue, in this period, which kept feminism alive), Alan said simply that it would be unfair if women were off work having babies.

Nor did he doubt that women would run round him clearing up the mess, and seeing to matters that he chose not to bother about himself.

In conversation with Don Bayley at Hanslope he mentioned how he had been engaged, that he had realised it 'would not work' because of his homosexuality, but also remarked that if he were ever to marry, it would be to someone non-mathematical, who would look after his domestic needs—a conventional attitude much closer to his family's, and untrue to the way in which his friendship with Joan Clarke had developed.

There was an unresolved contradiction here, at least at that stage of his life.

Nor did he ever do more for male supremacy than to share in its institutions. He never sought to justify his homosexuality in terms of preferring the superior male, for instance, and when set against the speech and writing of what everyone called the age of the common man, his comments were remarkably free of the stream of hostility, implicit or explicit, than most men felt entirely free to direct at the encroachments or pretensions of women.

Alan certainly spoke of 'girls' doing the menial work, and by implication cast them in the role of 'slaves' at Bletchley; yet this was simply the way things were, and if anything he was just a little more conscious of the inequity than were others who took it entirely for granted. He did nothing to change it, but then he had never sought to change the world, only to interpret it.