Family friendly measures to encourage women's employment need to be updated as they are very much out of date and are looked down upon by some sectors of civil society, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said this afternoon.

Addressing a press conference on women in employment, Dr Muscat said that while the government embraced the concept of equality on a political level, the public service was inconsistent in the way it  interpreted and exercised family friendly measures.

“While certain departments, agencies and companies employed them well, other viewed requests for family friendly measures in a very negative way.

“This is because when the package of family friendly measures was first introduced in the 1990s – which was a good package for the time – we are still using the same basis nowadays. The family composition and the type of jobs have changed a lot since then.

“We will be collaborating with the head of the civil service to address this.”

Dr Muscat said that measures such as free childcare were the first building blocks which would lead to the pension reform.

Sustainable pension system could be achieved through either increasing the age of retirement or increasing national insurance or through getting more people in the workforce, Dr Muscat said.

The government was looking at the third option.

Women born between 1950 and 1956 who, for some reason, did not pay the necessary national insurance to safeguard their pension will be allowed to pay it back in a staggered manner.

“During the period these women were employed, some were either not educated enough about the importance of paying national insurance or there were abuses because they were not listed on the work book.”