More women – particularly those in their late teens and 20s – are experimenting with bisexuality or at least feel more comfortable reporting same-sex encounters, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The survey, released Thursday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, found that 11.5 percent of women, ages 18 to 44, said they’ve had at least one sexual experience with another women in their lifetimes, compared with about 4 percent of women, ages 18 to 59, who said the same in a comparable survey a decade earlier.

For women in their late teens and 20s, the percentage rose to 14 percent in the more recent survey. About 6 percent of men in their teens and 20s said they’d had at least one same-sex encounter.

The findings on bisexuality and other aspects of Americans’ sexual habits were taken from the National Survey of Family Growth, which included 12,571 in-person interviews, done from March 2002 to March 2003.

When it comes to women and same-sex relationships, Mosher said it would be worth studying why young women seek such relationships, and whether they may be trying to avoid diseases more commonly spread through sex with men.

But some experts who study sexuality say it’s even more likely that many college students simply see experimentation as a rite of passage.

“It’s very safe in the academic community; no one thinks anything of it,” said Elayne Rapping, a professor of American studies at the University of Buffalo who has written about sexuality.

The survey of adults has a margin of error of 1 percentage point and 3 percentage points for the teen data.