Cohort Selection and Institutional Outcomes

This working paper presents the current state of the Cohort Selection research programme. It develops a diagnostic framework for analysing how educational pathways, candidate pools, and institutional recruitment structures shape the sex composition of occupational and institutional endpoints over time. The paper integrates four closely related components: the Endpoint Indeterminacy framework, the Candidate Pool Proposition, the Career Path Dependency Index (CPDI), and cohort propagation analysis. These are illustrated using publicly available Swedish administrative statistics from Statistics Sweden (SCB), the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket), the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ), and the Swedish National Courts Administration (Domstolsverket), including SCB's Regional Matching Indicators (RMI). Rather than presenting a completed validation study, the paper documents a transparent and falsifiable research programme. It distinguishes between descriptive, diagnostic, and directional predictive claims, explicitly identifies outstanding empirical tests, and proposes a prospective validation strategy based on accelerated longitudinal cohort designs. This Working Paper v1.0 serves as the primary reference document for the research programme. Future peer-reviewed publications will present more focused theoretical and empirical studies building upon the framework introduced here.