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The scene I came across recently in Tel Aviv was hard to believe: an energetic soccer team made up entirely of girls was being enthusiastically supported by a cheering section made up entirely of pompon-waving boys.

Does this mean that Israeli machismo has disappeared? Not quite! For that extraordinary event didn't take place in a soccer stadium but in a WIZO (Women's Institute Zionist Organization) day-care center, where machismo has indeed been rejected.

In a conscious effort to imbue 2- to 4-year-olds with the concept of gender equality, little boys at the center are encouraged to diaper dolls and little girls to saw pieces of wood, though, should they desire, the girls can also play with dolls and the boys can try their hand at carpentry.

The woman behind this approach, initiated in an upscale Tel Aviv neighborhood and now spreading to WIZO day-care centers throughout the country, is Drorit Amitai-Dror, who is national educational supervisor of the centers.

"While the education system does not create the problem of inequality," she says, "it aggravates the situation by ignoring the problem. I have no intention of doing so."

Amitai-Dror believes that preschools are precisely where the struggle against inequality can be most effective, "because Freud, Bulby, Ainsworth and others have shown that an individual's personality is shaped to a very significant extent between birth and the age of 3."

Yet however clear her own understanding of what needs to be done, Amitai-Dror realizes that the staff of the day-care centers and the parents of children sent there must be convinced that WIZO's new program is a good one. This is not easy.

At the Tel Aviv Center, for example, there was a religious woman on the staff who felt that an egalitarian approach to gender education was contrary to Jewish tradition, according to which the woman is a helpmate to the man. But seeing how Amitai-Dror's approach worked convinced her that treating boys and girls as equals would not undermine relations between the sexes. Now, indeed, she is an enthusiastic supporter of the program.

Most parents are equally enthusiastic, though there are doubts among a few of the men who have sons at day-care centers. They say that they are afraid that their offspring will become "sissies"; what they might mean is homosexuals. Their concern is unnecessary, Amitai-Dror says, for "we have no intention of confusing the boys about their sexual identity. We only want them to accept the fact that sweeping the floor or diapering a baby doesn't diminish their masculinity."

The center's concerted effort to break down sexual stereotypes is evident not only in the play areas, but also on the bulletin boards. There, one sees articles about a young woman who is an auto mechanic and a young man who is a nursery school teacher. Also on display is a cartoon in which a husband is shown washing a sink full of dishes while his wife stands by the front door, briefcase in hand, and says: "Have a good day darling; I'll see you this evening when I get back from work."

Mothers love that cartoon; fathers are less enthused.