LONDON — For the first time in the near millennium of Oxford University’s existence, incoming female students this year outnumbered their male peers.

According to data released by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, 1,070 women won undergraduate places to start at Oxford last fall, compared with 1,025 men.

In historic terms, the small, numeric difference is less an advance than a catching up. Although for most the 20th century fewer women made it to British universities than men, that divide was overcome in the 1990s, and by 2000 more than 133,000 women earned a first degree, the equivalent of a bachelor’s in the United States, as opposed to fewer than 110,000 men. By 2011, women had completed 197,565 first degrees, versus 153,235 men.

In 2016, the Higher Education Policy Institute released a report calling the gender gap in Britain a “national scandal” — only by this point it was male enrollment lagging female by 9.2 percentage points. The group proposed a “take our sons to university day” to try to correct the imbalance.