Fiona Bruce, the BBC presenter, has criticised the “large number of men” who make “hideously misogynistic” comments online in wake of the Twitter abuse of high-profile women such as Caroline Criado-Perez and Rebecca Adlington.

Bruce, a presenter of BBC1’s 6pm and 10pm news bulletins, as well as its Sunday evening show, Antiques Roadshow, said she was “astonished at the freedom with which a depressingly large number of men” feel they can say what they like about women.

The presenter said she shunned social media because of the vitriolic abuse that she has seen unleashed on fellow female celebrities.

“I’m astonished at the freedom with which a depressingly large number of men feel they can just say what they want and write the most hideously misogynistic stuff about women,” Bruce told the new issue of Radio Times.

“I look at my daughter and think, ‘God, I didn’t think this was coming your way’. I really didn’t. The misogyny on the internet is a whole area that you and I would never have thought was coming.”

Her comments come after double Olympic gold medal winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington revealed that she still gets abuse from Twitter trolls, and called for more monitoring of abuse on the social networking site.

Abuse of Adlington and other public figures such as writer and activist Criado-Perez and BBC presenter Mary Beard prompted Twitter to introduce an in-tweet “report abuse” button. Labour MP Stella Creasy also suffered a barrage of rape and death threats after offering her support to Criado-Perez.

Bruce said women presenters were valued differently from men but added: “Having said that, they’re all good-looking men – I can’t think of a male presenter who isn’t a good-looking bloke – but, you know, they’re not judged by their suits and ties.”

The 50-year-old presenter and mother of two has previously said that women TV presenters “can’t look like the back end of a bus”.

She also once revealed that she dyed her hair and said she “couldn’t believe it” when the issue was raised by John Humphrys in an interview with the BBC’s then director general George Entwistle on Radio 4’s Today programme.

Bruce said she sometimes has a drink in a hotel bar across from the BBC when she is presenting both the BBC1 evening bulletins.

She said she liked working in the BBC’s newly-refurbished Broadcasting House in central London “because if I’m doing the six o’clock and 10 o’clock bulletins, I can slip out in-between to the Langham hotel bar across the road and have an evening cocktail … I only ever have the one”.

The former Newsnight reporter dismissed any possibility of returning to the current affairs programme to take over from Jeremy Paxman, saying: “It’s not on my radar. I haven’t even thought about it.

“I love doing the six and the 10; it has a huge audience, so that’s quite a big thing to give up, that big an audience,” she said, adding that she would still like to become a magistrate when her broadcasting career ends.

Bruce said she did not feel any more secure in her role following current BBC director general Tony Hall’s commitment to putting more women on screen. “I don’t mean to sound self-important or conceited. I just wasn’t feeling insecure before then, and no one in anything I do had given me any reason to feel like that,” said Bruce.

“I mean, when the axe falls, it will be swift, and I will read about it in a newspaper before I will get told by the BBC – that’s just life.”

Bruce said attitudes about women on TV news had been changed by reporters such as the BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet. “Because when you listen to Lyse, you don’t think, ‘What is she wearing?’ Most of the time it’s a flak jacket. What you think is, ‘God – she’s in the middle of Aleppo risking her life.’”

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